Hostage dramas have a long and distinguished pedigree, from plays like Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage” and Frank McGuinness’s “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me,” to movies ranging from “Key Largo” to “The Inside Man.” But there’s another genre whose track record, at least in recent years, has been more checkered: the movie-to-stage-play adaptation (as distinct from musicals based on films, which are practically ubiquitous). In 2015, Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalf starred in a rickety stage version of the taut thriller “Misery,” and in 2019, Bryan Cranston headlined a flashy but ultimately empty version of the classic media satire “Network.”

“Dog Day Afternoon,” a lavish new production now on Broadway, marks the convergence of the former tradition and the latter trend. The bungled bank heist of the iconic 1975 film starring Al Pacino has been turned into a large-cast stage play, and on paper it has every reason to work: The script is by playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, who in plays like “Between Riverside and Crazy” or “The Mother— With the Hat” has shown an instinctual feel for colorfully flawed, self-defeating New York characters, and in the lead roles of the hapless bank robbers are Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, stars of Hulu’s gritty restaurant drama “The Bear.” The cast is stacked with first-rate stage pros, and David Korins’s rotating set is period-perfect.

Even more promising, potentially, are the surprising turns of the story, based on an actual bank robbery in Brooklyn in 1972 that was memorialized in a Life magazine article. The real-life head robber, a Vietnam veteran named John Wojtowicz, had a complicated life: He had left his wife for a male lover, with whom he had an elaborate gay wedding. And his reason for the bank heist was to pay for his new partner’s sex-change operation. The contemporary resonances could hardly be more plangent. 

The new stage play does tap a vein of tragic tenderness in this doomed relationship, with bank robber Sonny (Bernthal) and his lover, Leon/Leanne (Esteban Andres Cruz), having a touching tête-à-tête on the phone late in the action. But mostly the play doesn’t seem to know what to do with this development; Sonny awkwardly defends both his homosexuality and his manliness to his hostages and to the main cop with whom he’s negotiating, Fucco (John Ortiz). And between-scene blasts of glam-era David Bowie tunes nod to a gender-expansive consciousness that is otherwise not in evidence.

In any case, that’s not the main reason this new stage version misfires. The problem is more mundane: A single-set hostage drama needs to feel like a pressure cooker, especially at the start, but this “Dog Day Afternoon” has a comedic, almost casual tone throughout. In the lead role, Bernthal has charm and swagger to spare, but no hint of danger; as if to overcompensate, Moss-Bachrach plays his sidekick, Sal, as a quiet, dim near-psychopath. In the show’s tension-free context, even that affect registers as simply quirky, not threatening.

The other stress-ratcheting element that’s missing here is one that’s understandably hard to recreate in the theatre: In both real life and in the 1975 movie, the robbers and hostages were confined in the bank for hours, less due to criminal calculation than because they were surrounded by over 100 cops, news crews and a rowdy crowd of onlookers. The one moment when the play attempts to recreate a sense of that circus atmosphere is legitimately stirring. When Sonny emerges from the bank to taunt the cops and roil the crowd, director Rupert Goold has placed actors, guns drawn, throughout the theatre’s aisles and balconies, and has cast us as the watching crowd. Sonny draws authentic cheers with a speech that could be delivered today about ICE:

All this show of force…it ain’t for me! They don’t need a whole army of blue bozos to put two in the back of my head—bag me, tag me—this is for you people! Make no mistake. They wanna scare you! They wanna make sure you don’t rob a bank someday!

The frisson quickly dissipates, though, along with any sense of the pressures of the outside world.

Some of the disconnect here may be due to a difference in medium. While a film can show a lot without telling, a play typically gives characters more room to talk and explain themselves. And you can’t blame Guirgis for jumping at the chance to flesh out so many character details and to hash out timely arguments over the state of New York City, heavyhanded policing and the general desperation of everyday life in a corrupt world. This may be why the play’s second act, when the bank tellers have bonded with their captors and the mood is more hangout than hold-up, is generally stronger than the first; by this point, the absence of suspense becomes less of a liability (though it kneecaps the ending). If you came to this ostensible thriller for character development and social commentary, you may leave satisfied.

But don’t take it from me. I may be unconvinced by the stage-worthiness of this “Dog Day Afternoon,” but I’m willing to admit that I may be an outlier. The audience at the show I attended seemed genuinely into it, and my 16-year-old son found it engaging. He’s a fan of the tetchy films of the Safdie brothers (“Uncut Gems,” “Good Time”), which owe a clear debt to the original “Dog Day Afternoon,” and this was his first Guirgis play. If this lopsided effort functions as his gateway to even better stuff, I can’t count this failed heist a total loss.

Rob Weinert-Kendt, an arts journalist and editor of American Theatre magazine, has written for The New York Times and Time Out New York.