Domino

Ealasaid/ October 17, 2005/ Movie Reviews and Features

Directed by: Tony Scott
Starring: Keira Knightley, Mickey Rorke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo, Christopher Walken, Mena Suvari.
Rated: R for strong violence, pervasive language, sexual content/nudity and drug use.
Parental Notes: This is not a kids film. This is probably not a film you want your preteens or immature teenagers seeing either. It’s gleefully violent and the main character borders on being a sociopath.

Domino, the new film from Tony Scott (“Man on Fire”), begins with huge, white block letters on a black screen: “This film is based on a true story.”. Then it’s amended: “Sort of.” That unapologetic refusal to let reality get in the way permeates the film, not only in the way it differs from the life of the late Domino Harvey but also in whether the events it shows us are even possible at all. It’s like one of those huge, special-effects laden concerts. We know people can’t really breathe fire or fly through the air, but it sure does look cool. We don’t go to shows like that, or to movies like “Domino,” to see reality. We go to have our senses assaulted and our minds blown.
“Domino” follows our heroine from her disaffected youth in high society (her father was an actor and her mother a Vogue cover girl) through her career as a bounty hunter. It’s told mostly in flashbacks as Domino explains everything to an FBI analyst (Lucy Liu). Keira Knightley plays our heroine with fearless intensity, and it quickly becomes clear that while Domino may do things on impulse, she never backs down, ever. She bullies Ed Moseby (Mickey Rorke), a top bounty hunter, into letting her join his team after signing up for his class on a whim. The team consists of Ed and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), a half-crazed young man who almost immediately falls for Domino.
The trio are immensely successful, and soon Domino has not only won the Bounty Hunter of the Year Award but gotten television producer Mark Heiss (Christopher Walken) interested in doing a reality show about their work. Soon Ed, Domino, and Choco are involved in a heist which involves money stolen from an armored car, a quartet of DMV workers, the mafia, a casino owner, and plenty of others. It’s incredibly complicated and not easy to follow in spite of the diagrams the film provides.
It may be fortunate that by this time, the audience has been so battered by flashbacks, jumping subtitles to emphasize the wittiest bits of dialog, hand-held jiggle-cam, and the grainy, super-saturated colors of the film that it doesn’t really matter whether we can keep track of who exactly is trying to do what to whom. Even reality has been bent — there are several scenes which are rewound as we learn that they didn’t actually happen at all. It’s hard to complain about something not making sense when the very scenes you’re watching have a tenuous grip on reality.
Domino is a difficult character on a number of fronts. She is completely unafraid of physical danger and uses her sexuality and physical attractiveness as a weapon. She offers a lap dance in exchange for information at one point, and constantly dresses provocatively. But, as one fellow astutely observes before she breaks his nose for his trouble, it seems likely that somewhere inside she’s just a scared little girl with daddy issues. If “Domino” were less frenetic and more interested in storytelling than in making us gape at its raving lunacy, Domino might be a good, although ultimately tragic, subject for a character study.
“Domino”, however, is not a character study. It’s a roller coaster ride, a lunatic race through frenetic, unreal territory. By the end, anything seems possible because it is. The plot is so divorced from the real world that it seems almost natural that an elevator lacks the standard emergency braking systems, that a man doesn’t bleed to death after having an arm blown off, or that Tom Waits appears as a divinely-inspired preacher in the middle of nowhere. Things don’t happen because they make sense, they happen because someone on the creative team thought it would be exciting.
Whether you will enjoy “Domino” depends almost entirely upon whether you like this sort of film. Think of “Natural Born Killers,” “Kill Bill,” or any of the other hyper-violent, surreal paeons to cinematic lunacy. “Domino” is definitely of their ilk. I certainly enjoyed it, unreality and poor character development and all, but I see approximately a hundred films a year. Domino required me to throw my complaints out a window and then rewarded me for doing so by being unrepentantly over-the-top. Is it a good movie? Probably not. Is it enjoyable? Without a doubt — for the right sort of audience. This is a love-it-or-hate-it sort of film, and I suspect that you can tell from the trailer which camp you’ll fall into.
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