Arvid (Dejan Cukic) is a pushover who can't seem to find his way in life. He works at a bank and lives with his girlfriend, Hanne. The two get into an argument over breakfast because Arvid donated 800 crowns to a church fund—money that Hanne wanted to use for shopping. As he tries to move past the dispute unscathed she makes him out to be a boring purist who's trying to save the world.

We then jump to Richard (Lester Wiese), a traveling American who settles into a seat at a bar and has a mysterious meeting with Arvid at noon. The bartender and a patron start to chat with him. With two hours to spare until Arvid's arrival, he recaps the recent series of events that have put Arvid in a delicate situation—a man who up until 12 days prior Richard had never heard of.

The rest of the film is a series of flashbacks leading up to Arvid's meeting with Richard. Following his argument with Hanne, Arvid went to work and encountered a disgruntled customer who decided to help himself to a “loan” with a shotgun. Tired of standing on the sidelines, Arvid strikes the man with a racket and puts an end to the sloppy robbery. His employers decide to reward him for his heroic efforts and send him home early with a paid vacation. When he gets to his apartment he discovers that his girlfriend has left him and taken all of their furniture. A woman comes to his door and starts to attack him, claiming that she's the girlfriend of the man he interfered with at the bank and that they needed the money to try and get in vitro fertilization. Out on the street, a crummy rock band attacks him on the grounds of being a hero.

The essay by Michael Joshua Rowin included with this film seems to approach the film's historical aspects, presenting its theme as an overflowing aggression from the director in the turbulent '60s. Rowin addresses the fact that Ferreri - unlike his peers Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Fellini - made films that went against the norm and were arguably ahead of their time. For Ferreri, the '60s meant the drastic change in the importance of politics and culture, which was replaced by materialism, technological stimulus, and constant protest. He claims that Dillinger is Dead is Ferreri's “angriest” work, and that its masculinity shines through its use of a war-friendly atmosphere, "weak" female characters, and phallic symbols. There is no argument that Ferreri was tackling the changes in his world in a way that requires some delving into and critique. My review of Dillinger is Dead is not to go against those made by Rowin and other critics, but to give a different understanding of the lead character. From someone who is familiar with the films of Ferreri's peers, and other Foreign New-Wave directors, there was something fantastic about this film that has nothing to do with political and social change—a quality that is a bit more universal and relevant.

And daddy doesn’t understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reasons
'Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?
-- Bob Geldof

At age 22, Britain's "most violent criminal" Charles Bronson (né Michael Peterson, who initially took the name for his short-lived boxing career and then had it legally changed; here played by Tom Hardy) began serving a 7-year sentence for armed robbery. The year was 1974, less than 2 years after Stanley Kubrick pulled his movie Clockwork Orange from the theaters due to death threats. With the exception of just over 4 months, Bronson has spent the last 35 years as a ward of the state, all but 4 of them in solitary confinement. This extended sentence has to do with his seeming love of violence for violence's sake, something like the performance art of an evil Andy Kaufman. As such, he's a child of Alex de Large, or an Agent Orange -- that is, one whose real life lends itself to Kubrick's satire. Or, at least, that's how Bronson's director Refn takes it (some of Bronson's victims tend to approach his nature a little less abstractly). Therefore, Refn gives us Clockwork Orange's malevolent juxtapositions of barbarity and high-toned culture, gravitas and cornball pop tunes, with a comic book color palette and told through the wide-angled, symmetrical perspective of a demented narrator in clown makeup. Not exactly original, but like Cape Fear was to Hitchcock, livelier than most other films that don't steal from only one source.