Spike TV hasn't exactly been synonymous with great dramatic television in its short life, but that might change later this month. "The Kill Point" casts Donnie Wahlberg as Cali, a Pittsburgh police hostage negotiator and John Leguizamo as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a bank heist gone horribly wrong.

Their pas de deux is the backbone of the eight-hour thriller, as the standoff becomes very dangerous - and very public. The show premieres with a two-hour episode on July 22 at 9 p.m. But it takes several hours for the full story behind the heist to come to light. The robbers, it turns out, are Iraq War veterans.

"Their past will play heavily in that their soldiers," creator James DeMonaco told critics today at the television critics summer press tour in Hollywood. "It's primarily a suspense thriller with political undertones, but it plays in a big way that they're soldiers that are very capable, and therefore are formidable."??

Viewers, in fact, might pick up on that sooner than Cali.??

"I think they're calling John 'Sarge' pretty early on," DeMonaco said. "It's a slower realization for the cops, but Donnie is picking up on the small clues that these guys are different than your normal hostage-takers, that there's something else behind them. As we go on, you'll see more about their pasts, and what happened in Iraq. It's definitely a big part of the show."??

"That was the great thing about it," said Leguizamo, "that it was a slow reveal of character, a slow reveal of the past. And the audience were being taken slowly through it. You had to wait it out. It wasn't all, like, spoon-fed right away."??

In fact, it sounds like this is a thriller that won't please the Bush Administration very much.

Leguizamo went to a Veterans Administration Hospital and hung out with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who "shared their stories and shared their pain," he said.??

"And that's what hooked me into the show, how do we make these guys as real as possible and address this whole issue of vets coming back," Leguizamo said. "You know, forget the robber. Forget the action stuff ... It was like, how do we make this as real as possible, all the PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the guys not getting their benefits. And if (they) speak against the war, then everything is taken away from them and they become ostracized from everybody. And if you go to therapy, then you become 'weak.' There was a lot of pain in there, and I was hoping to put it into my character."??

Remember "Dog Day Afternoon?" Al Pacino shouting, "Attica! Attica!" in the street? There's some of that in "The Kill Point," only Leguizamo's Wolf is talking about Iraq.??

"Two movies," said DeMonaco. "I mean, obviously, anybody who knows 'Dog Day' could see the influence. And 'The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three.' I think as a child I was obsessed with both of those films."??

But as with "Dog Day," Wolf's folk hero status isn't entirely earned.??

"We never really wanted the show to become preachy," DeMonaco said. "So if you really analyze each move he makes when he's doing his grandstanding gestures talking about the war, it's very duplicitous and self-serving, too. He's always doing it, like in the pilot, it was really to create the Stockholm effect which will hold the troops at bay."??

Thing is, that works, Wahlberg said.??

"I think one of the interesting things is, even though my character suspects that a lot of (Wolf's) political agenda is spur of the moment - it's him reacting, it's him desperate to come up with a way to buy time - I think in some ways my character ends up suffering a little bit of Stockholm Syndrome as well and really starts to develop a rapport," Wahlberg said. "I know for me personally and for my character, there was a real duality to it. He was very suspect of it, but at the same time, he was still affected and really drawn to this guy."??

And when Wahlberg referred to Wolf and his crew as "the bad guys," Leguizamo begged to differ.??

"Antihero, I prefer," he said, drawing a laugh from the reporters. "I mean yeah, for all purposes he is sort of the antagonist of the piece, but I saw him, the way he was written, he was a hero."