director
Tony Scott
screenwriter
Richard
Kelly
story by
Richard
Kelly
Steve Barancik
producers
Samuel Hadida
Ridley Scott
Tony Scott
cinematographer
Daniel Mindel
music
Harry Gregson-Williams
editors
William Goldenberg
Christian Wagner
cast
Keira Knightley (Domino Harvey)
Mickey Rourke (Ed Mosbey)
Edgar Ramirez (Choco)
Rizwan Abbasi (Alf)
Delroy Lindo (Claremont Williams)
Mo'Nique (Lateesha Rodriguez)
Ian Ziering (Himself)
Brian Austin Green (Himself)
Dabney Coleman (Drake Bishop)
Lucy Liu (Taryn Miles)
Jacqueline Bisset (Sophie Wynn)
Christopher Walken (Mark Heiss)
Mena Suvari (Kimmie)
Tom Waits (Wanderer)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 125m
u.s.
release: 10/14/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other tony
scott films
reviewed on this website:
- the
fan (1996)
- spy
game
- true
romance
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Domino Harvey, who died last
summer at 34, was a model and the daughter of actor Laurence
Harvey. Her rootless early life left her with a lot of aggression,
which found focus in her second career as a bounty hunter. The
director Tony Scott was a friend of hers, and he's made much
in the press about how his new film Domino is a tribute
to her memory. That'd be nice if it were true, but the only thing
Domino pays homage to -- or shows affection for -- is
Scott's heavy hand in the editing room. Sure to be regarded as
excruciating by some and electrifying by others, the movie is
run through so many filters, film stocks, and Avid whiz-bang
it makes Natural
Born Killers look like Barry Lyndon.
I usually loathe such hyperactive
lab experiments; Oliver Stone, in Natural Born Killers,
at least incorporated the scattershot style into his message
about how the media fractures us all, and he used it in an emotionally
direct (if bullying) way that kept us subliminally connected
to the characters. Tony Scott doesn't do anything like that in
Domino -- there's no real thematic reason for the movie
to look or act the way it does; it's just a gimmick. That said,
I didn't mind it much. Domino has been lambasted all over
the place, but it's not that bad; it leaves us as exhausted
as its heroine (Keira Knightley), but much of the ride is amusing.
"Based on a true story
-- sort of," the ads qualify. Well, Domino is a movie
-- sort of. It's like an entire season of a nonexistent Domino
TV series telescoped frantically into two hours and five minutes
of highlights, with all the plot convolutions that implies. Essentially,
it's a string of double-crosses and triple-crosses in which Domino
and her partners -- hard-bitten beef jerky Ed Mosbey (Mickey
Rourke) and sensitive ex-con Choco (Edgar Ramirez) -- attempt
to locate $10 million so that their cut of the take can pay for
a young girl's operation. I could try to explain the connection
between Domino and the young girl, but it would be the most complicated
sentence ever; it involves Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique, the FBI, the
Mafia, the Jerry Springer Show, and a reality show
tailing Domino's every move (directed from a trailer by Christopher
Walken).
Dabney Coleman is in it. Brian
Austin Green and Ian Ziering, veterans of Beverly Hills 90210,
are in it as themselves -- sort of. Tom Waits is in it.
Domino is one insane gibbering beast, leagues more idiosyncratic
than the average action flick, and I suppose part of this is
due to the participation of screenwriter Richard Kelly, who wrote
and directed 2001's brilliantly confounding Donnie
Darko. I enjoyed seeing Mickey Rourke and Christopher
Walken share the screen again, though it's nothing more dramatic
than a "creative meeting" for the reality show. Keira
Knightley poses and snarls fetchingly enough, but time will tell
whether she can act or just attitudinize -- in any event, Domino
is written as a posturing and hollow collection of bad-grrl reflexes,
so there's nothing that even a seasoned and complex actress could've
done that Knightley doesn't do. Like the character herself, she's
needed only as a face, a voice, a body.
Domino is the sort of disreputable night out that I
hesitate to recommend because it's disreputable in the wrong
ways -- it exemplifies pretty much everything I despise about
the direction movies are heading. But Tony Scott works in a spirit
of caffeinated roughhouse fun. It probably gets at the tone
of bounty-hunting work more effectively than a more sober-sided
account of the actual Domino Harvey's life could have. I have
no idea if the film's aggressively cluttered plot is based on
anything real, but it's structured as a bad-girl-makes-good parable
with an Xtreme veneer. At the very end, we see the real woman
herself, looking gaunt and tomboyish and almost shy, yet her
eyes tell us more about the reality of her life than the preceding
two hours. Those eyes almost shame us for what we've been watching.
I had a good time, though -- sort of.
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