Based the life story (sort of) of Domino Harvey, a one-time model and daughter of The Manchurian Candidate himself, Lawrence Harvey, Domino is Tony Scott’s latest in excess gone too far. Scott’s recipe includes bringing every film trick in the book, mixing them in a blender, sprinkling an obnoxious soundtrack to taste, and topping it all off with a heavy dose of bullshit. Excruciatingly bad, Domino achieves a higher level of squalor than Beat the Devil, Scott’s horrible commercial for BMW Films. A bratty little rich girl, Domino, played by Keira Knightley in a faux-bad girl mode that’s just as unconvincing as it is boring, just wants to break free and explore the world according to her own rules. She gets a job as a bounty hunter with Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez, showing he can pull of Latino love just slightly better Ricky Martin), and is caught in an elaborate kidnapping scam orchestrated by their employer, Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo). How, or why she gets the bounty hunter job is unimportant. Let’s just say that if all interview applications required you to throw a knife through your employer’s windshield, life would be a lot more fun. More troublesome: when the kidnapping goes wrong and ends up involving the mob, the F.B.I, and every Tom, Dick and Harry, it’s clear that Scott and the screenwriter Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) just tapped into the True Romance deleted scenes to stretch the running time. How is it that within the first twenty minutes of Domino, you can easily predict that the film will end on the tired Mexican stand-off cliché? Scott has been inexplicably been given free range (giving the Scott Free production company added irony) over the film – so much so that Domino wallows in the same mess of overproduction and hyper-stylized excess that plagued his previous films, such as the aforementioned Beat the Devil and Man on Fire. Scott would have us believe that watching a film that allows four different cuts every time a character checks his watch is something revelatory and exciting. Constant shifting film stocks, an overbearing soundtrack, gimmicky subtitles that glide across the screen and name characters, are not the work of a genius filmmaker – they’re just a lazy attempt at presenting a convoluted and boring story without actually trying hard. For all its tricks, Domino should come with a disclaimer warning: may cause motion sickness, epileptic seizures, and/or a waste of time. You’ve been warned.
Richard Saad
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006