I'd heard of this film many times before, and I finally got to see it a few months ago. It's a timeless classic about a desperate man who goes into a bank robbery that will inevitably end in his failure. Indeed, it is not only timeless, but it is based on a true story. The events of this 1975 film were based on the events in real life on August 22, 1972.

It starts off with Sonny, a young, smart, desperate, married, apparently bisexual, and lower-class Italian, played by Al Pacino. He's street-smart, he fought in Vietnam, he's running the stick-up in order to get money for his homosexual lover to have a sex-change operation. He's also married to a chubby and shrill woman with three kids, and he has a terrifically possessive mother. Al Pacino plays this character exceedingly well, making much of the audience and indeed the characters of the film, feel a great sympathy for him throughout the movie. This is perhaps one of Pacino's great performances, although he has had many others. Sonny needs money for, among other things, his male lover's sex change operations, and decides to rob a Brooklyn bank with his religious, weird, and at times, downright retarded, friend, Sal. As they arrive there, everything seems to be going right, they go in, stick up the tellers get everyone into a corner, get the bank manager out and disable the alarms, since Sonny knows where they are after an experience working as a low-paid teller in such banks. But then failure hits them as they open the vault, all the money has been removed from the vault, and guess what a bunch of local cops have just seen them from across the street! The police arrive on the scene, along with a horde of locals, who as the movie goes on, begin to start rooting for the persecuted common man, Sonny. Inevitably, there is a good cop, and a bad cop, in the force, a guy who wants action, and a guy who wants to talk to Sonny, Sergeant Moretti, played quite nicely by Charles Durning. As the movie progresses, the situation gets worse into the night, Sonny's male lover and wife are brought into the scene and try to talk him out of it at certain points in the film, Sal getting more and more nervous, different deals being proposed and then failing, trading of hostages for favors and such being proposed, and other drama as the afternoon turns into a long night. The robbers become a sort of instant celebrity, and so do the people involved with them, although it also shows that eventually the public will run out of interest for you, the public has a short attention span. It approaches the whole robbery situation in a long, interesting, almost documentary-like approach, with a lot of dark and irreverent humor. Finally, as the film begins to end (it seemed a little too long) a deal is finalized between Moretti and Sonny, a bit of the hostages being released, and the rest of them joining Sal and Sonny on a police-provided van to an airplane waiting to take them away to Africa where they'll be free. But inevitably, as it is with these good films, and as it is with real life, since this is based on a true story, things do not go as planned. The ending is satisfying, albeit extremely tragic.

Although at first I thought this movie would be the predictable bank robbing film, in the end, it turned out to not really be that, since it was one of the major ones that many other crappy films like John Q drew off of. Lots of stupid movies like John Q in the "break into somewhere and take hostages, and then have a long standoff with the cops" movie genre steal many elements from Dog Day Afternoon, but it will always be the best of that genre in my opinion, a truly splendid film.