The film revolves around the inexperienced criminal Sony Sony Wortzik (Al Pacino). He is leading a new mission by stealing a bank in Brooklyn to fund Lyon's sex change operation. Things seem to be on a different path as there is almost no money in the bank, and the hostage situation is developing on a bad path.
[Pacino] gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.
One of Sidney Lumet's best jobs of directing and one of Al Pacino's best performances (as a bisexual bank robber) come together in a populist thriller with lots of New York juice
As much as it is about a deeply troubled individual, "Dog Day Afternoon" is about a shift toward exploitation in the American media via live television.
The film's strength lies in its depiction of surfaces, lacking the visual or intellectual imagination to go beyond its shrewd social and psychological observations and its moments of absurdist humour.
[Dog Day Afternoon] speaks to a particular moment in an edgy early 1970s New York City -- a post-Stonewall city of people figuring out identities, and bubbling with anti-establishment anger and a nascent culture of exploitation media.
Enjoyable and even exciting at the start, Dog Day Afternoon degenerates into frustration and tedium toward nightfall -- an experience no less painful for the audience than for the actors.
