SPOILER ALERT: In case you don’t know the true story of Brian Brown-Easley there are significant plot details revealed in this review.
Read on at your own discretion.Premiering today in the official dramatic competition section of the Sundance Film Festival, the devastating true story of Brian Brown-Easley, a disgruntled Marine veteran who held up an Atlanta Wells Fargo Bank out of desperation to bring attention to his plight after not receiving his monthly disability check of $892, has been brought to the screen with the edge-of-your-seat intensity of a fictional thriller, but sadly this is no fiction, but rather the awful truth so many forgotten military vets experience in this country.Writer/Director Abi Damaris Corbin (who co-wrote with Kwame Kwei-Armah) adapted Aaron Gell’s article “They Didn’t Have To Kill Him” , a title that tells you what happened to Brown-Easley before you have even read the first paragraph.
This film version plays it out in more linear fashion, and while not on the same filmmaking level as Sidney Lumet’s 1975 Dog Day Afternoon in which Al Pacino played another desperate man, you may still find yourself biting your nails out of frustration for what Brian went through and what drove him there.892 is no biopic and unlike Gells’ exhaustively researched 2018 article that tells this man’s life story leading up to that fateful July 2017 day, Corbin almost exclusively focuses on the action inside that bank and the attempt by law enforcement on the outside and in an emergency center to save the hostages and end the standoff.
Of course there have been countless movies other than the crown jewel of them all, Dog Day, that focus on bank holdups, but the gut-wrenching and sad tale of Brian Brown-Easley
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