How sad is this?

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Often very funny, occasionally quite sad documentary on the life and hard times of "The Dog", John Wojtowicz, the real life man played by Al Pacino in "Dog Day Afternoon" – the hapless bank robber who held up a NYC bank to pay for his lover's sex change operation and (first) to get her released from a psychiatric hospital. Wojtowicz is affable and funny, completely un self-conscious about his rather insane life, his voracious, intense and sometimes confusing sexual and romantic appetites, his love of the spotlight. But there are also moments when we realize this likable eccentric does have a side that is closer to dangerously crazy and delusional than to simply 'off-beat' and that tension is one of the fascinating tears that run through the man and the film. It's also clear that John to a certain extent is also playing the role of 'John' for the cameras, which adds to the humor of the film (he has a very funny habit of saying things like 'action' and 'cut' to the documentary camera that is filming him), but also asks deeper questions about fleeting fame and how it can distort one's personality and perceptions of self and reality. Perhaps the most lovely thing about "The Dog" is how truly un-judgmental it seems. While it celebrates the humor in the absurdities of John's life story and his person (and those around him), it never feels like we're watching a freak show that sniggers at it's subjects from a distance. These may be odd people, but the film never seems to forget that they are people first and odd second, or that we're all odd in one way or another. I feel like the filmmakers genuinely liked John. It's a complex and rich portrait of a very unique man, sort of a hero, sort of a villain, sort of crazy, sort of scary, sort of wonderful.

Personally, I think Dog Day Afternoon is the greatest American film of the 20th century. It clicks for me like few films do. Naturally, it was easy for me to invest in The Dog about the real Sonny, John Wojtowicz. One thing I didn't expect was that the documentary would be so wickedly funny. Just like how Chris Smith's American Movie feels like it teeters on mockumentary, The Dog piles on classic one liners by people who don't realize just how funny they are. Wojtowicz is a hell of a character. He's repulsive, yet endearing, I can see how people are put off this film as he dares you to leave before its over in its opening seconds. He's a total control freak, offering saying action and cut for the directors. Here we have this guy bulging with fat and mouth full of rotten teeth admitting he's a pervert and motivated by sex. It's incredible what that one inert desire propels us into doing. The film adds layers upon layers of contradiction, fleshing out the character of John, the way he wants to be seen and the way he would never want to be seen. He's almost too good to be true. For the first hour, it's brilliantly entertaining, earning belly laughs for the absurdity of the anecdotes. Even if they're embellishing in lies, the situations themselves and especially the delivery are still amusing. It's a really dense documentary, painting a vivid picture with a great soundtrack to match. While Dog Day Afternoon is a microcosm of these types of farcical events that happen in America, this documentary emphasises the man against the system aspect, and for a fan of Sidney Lumet's films, there's great real life footage of the fateful event that puts it into perspective. Then the film gets devastating as it details the deterioration of Wojtowicz, however much of a bad person he may be. I simply can't believe this film is being so criminally overlooked, the time put into this is phenomenal considering John died in 2006. The directors must have been sitting on this footage for a long time. I'm so glad they got to share it with us and make a film that does justice to the original masterpiece. Bravo. I'm head over heels for this gripping, hilarious, thorough, thoughtful and heartfelt doc.9/10

"I robbed this bank." T-shirt Dog wears in front of the infamous bank.The Dog is a documentary tribute to the genius of Al Pacino. Although it's not at all about Pacino, his depiction of Brooklyn-Italian John Wojtowicz in Dog Day Afternoon, who robbed a branch bank in the summer of 1972 to fund the sex-change operation of his lover, was so spot on that, as eccentric and wild as John is, Pacino's performance was constantly on my mind.The doc, filled with repetitive declamations from John about his willingness to chew up life, is most interesting for me briefly when his first wife, Carmen, hints that John may have robbed the Brooklyn bank because of debt to the mob, not just the sex change. Wish I could have seen that back-story because the film mostly lets John ramble on.Alas, the film belongs to Republican Vietnam vet John, whose arc moves to and past his defining role in the botched robbery. While he claims to have married as many as four men, we watch him age in a manic pose, always talking, usually defending his bizarre bisexual exploits, seeming never to step out of his rebel role, fighting and eventually losing to cancer.Even prison can't dull his enthusiasm for the bizarre sexuality that has been his signature. It is the '70's after all, when the Gay Activists Alliance was born. For John, it's a chance to find partners more than sympathy with the emerging Greenwich Village Stonewall initiative. The doc pays little attention to the actual robbery (I suppose it would be futile to try to match Sydney Lumet's superb film adaptation) and chooses to emphasize Dog's bravado and his close relationship with his mother, Terry (amateur psych sleuths can already smell Oedipus if not Freud). She is one tough little lady, enduring his increasingly strange actions with a love and equanimity suggesting she could also be the subject of a doc. It's doubtful how she could be held even partially responsible for a man who robs a bank and takes hostages.Dog embodies self absorption and willful violation of civility that eventually make him much less likable than the odd Brooklyn punk he started out as. Thanks goodness for the archival news footage and Al Pacino.

The story of "Dog Day Afternoon" always intrigued me, since I never believed that the whole thing was true -- it didn't seem plausible that anyone like John, the "Dog" of the title, could really exist. After watching this documentary, I can say without a doubt that this person really existed, and not only that, but that he's even more entertaining in real life than Al Pacino was in the famous movie that was made about it. John is a multi-faceted, bizarre, crazy clown of a man with the most fascinating approach to gay rights ever. He is hilarious, headstrong, outspoken, a sheer nut case, and incredibly sympathetic, even heart breaking in his dedication to those he loves. His purpose in robbing the bank, to get his lover a sex-change operation, always seemed to be a plot device added to the film by the scriptwriter. Amazingly, it is all true, and even more truth is yet to come.One thing that really surprised me was the treatment of the relationship between John and his second "wife" -- Leon. John was actually married to a biological woman and had two children with her, and not only married Leon, he also married another man later in life. John was not only ahead of his time, way before gay marriage existed, he invented a new form of marriage, the likes of which would never be legal, at least in our lifetimes.In the movie "Dog Day Afternoon", John holds up the bank in order to get enough money for his lover Leon's sex change operation. I could never believe that the man played by Pacino could do such a thing, but watching John in this film, it is believable -- again, the truth here is stranger than fiction. Even John's mother actually appeared on the scene as in the movie, which also seems impossible until you meet John's real life mother. At first, John's relationship with his mother seems merely abnormal -- later, it seems like these two people deserve each other in being two sides of the same bizarre coin.Added to this is the fact that John never regrets his decision to go through with the robbery, regardless of having gone to jail and having spent a great deal of time in maximum security -- when interviewed after being captured, he still admitted that he was in love with Leon, and would have done it again if he had to do it all over again.What complicates this unbelievable sacrifice is a very candid interview when John is on a cable-access-type show, when John and Leon, (now having had the operation and transitioned into Liz), are both giving their individual perspectives, and Leon/Liz hints that there might have been another reason as to why John robbed the bank, to which John is not admitting. This opens up yet another can of worms that is never answered. It leaves a gaping hole in John's motivation for robbing the bank, and brings us back again to the essential question: how is it possible that truth can be so much stranger than fiction?