Domino
You know it’s a sad sign of moviemaking when you get to a scene here where several of the main characters suddenly start tripping on mescaline, but the style of the film doesn’t change a bit because that’s the way the movie’s been riding all along. That’s what we get here from director Tony Scott, using the acid-fuelled style of Natural Born Killers to tell the story of Domino Harvey, a beautiful young woman who, for a time, became a top-notch bounty hunter on the West Coast. Except, the events in the film are nothing like the real Domino’s life, and is indeed an over-the-top action film undone by its own kinetic franticness. Keira Knightly takes on the role of Domino, which could have done big things for her career–if only the character were not so intensely dislikable. Exhibiting oodles of attitude for attitude’s sake, the script by Richard Kelly forgot to add something that help the viewer connect to her, so instead we get the adventures of Tough Girl and little else. As her mentor, Mickey Rourke gets a few good scenes and lines, mostly in the first half, and is pretty much the best thing about the film, making one kinda wish he were the main subject. Edgar Ramirez’s Choco is nothing less than a complete idiot, talking in Spanish incessantly to impress Domino, and at one point taking an order a little too literally in a digustingly unnecessary moment. Delroy Lindo contributes another one of his patented charisma-free performances as their bail bondsman boss, and Monique is downright repulsive as his DMV girlfriend who gets them way over their heads, even as Scott becomes incredibly indulgent with her character in an unfunny and overlong Jerry Springer segment that adds nothing to the film. I DID enjoy the 90210 guys coming in and subtlely poking fun at themselves (even if they overstay their welcome a bit), but any film that completely wastes the talents of Christopher Walken in a boring(?) supporting role must surely be burned, not to mention Mena Suvari as his assistant. And it is nice to finally see Dabney Coleman back on the big screen, even though his character doesn’t really get what he deserves. And overall, using the Domino persona to tell this morally ambiguous and FICTIONAL action movie really gets ridiculous as she tells her story to an FBI agent played by Lucy Liu (and the fact that the Lindo character gets off scot-free when he should’ve spent the rest of his life in prison is a disgrace). The real Domino was a junkie and drug addict who outside of the bounty hunting, did little good with her life, but here she’s painted as a saint, right down to having Tom Waits pull up as a preacher and practically anoint her as such. There are occasional flashes of the old Tony Scott brilliance, but the final scenes and shootout try too hard to ape the conclusion of his True Romance, and having an Afghani suicide bomber character played up like a hero is too much to take. The film’s final “life-affirming” monologue by Domino is especially laughable given that she ODed a couple of months before the film’s release, and in the end this is really something only for Rourke and Knightly completists…
4/10