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Slowly tumbling down
I'm not exactly sure at what point Tony Scott became more about style than substance. I want to say it was with Man on Fire, but there was actually a great character piece behind the pomp and circumstance of that film. Maybe it even goes back to the glitzy Enemy of the State, but that was at least an entertaining joy ride. I think it may have been his more recent short films, his episode of the BMW commercial-as-art The Hire or the Amazon.com story-be-damned Agent Orange. Domino takes all of Tony Scott's recent "signatures" to the extreme. The on-screen, multi-font subtitles, the over exposed or under saturated shot, the MTV-style video editing, repeated and chopped dialogue. It's all there. Way there. All can be used to good effect, as we saw in Man on Fire , but they can also become very tiresome. After a disclaimer that Domino is "based on a true story… sort of," the film starts out fresh and likable. Keira Knightley plays the titular role of Domino Harvey, a model turned bounty hunter. The real-life Domino gained notoriety because her father was Laurence Harvey, an actor best known for his work in the original Manchurian Candidate. Having grown up in the Beverly Hills 90210 lifestyle fancied by her mother (played in the movie by Jacqueline Bissett), there is never really any rational reason why Domino becomes a bounty hunter, other than boredom. And that's where the movie version of Domino goes wrong. There's no rational behavior amongst its characters, no explanation for why they do things. You'd think that with such liberties that Tony Scott and screenwriter Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) take with Domino's life, they'd at least be able to create intriguing characters, but instead we are just left with ciphers. We don't really know Domino, even though she is our narrator through a twisting and turning story that never really ends up where you expect it to. More focus is given instead to flashy editing and on screen camera tricks. And while the flash factor is "cool" for the first half of the film, the effect wears off when you realize there's not much under the flashy veneer. There were hints of this in the overly long Man on Fire, but Denzel Washington's charisma as a wounded character stole the show. It was about one man against the world. Maybe that's why Domino fails. The movie should be about her struggles and her needs, but it is overly populated with too many minor characters. The always great Christopher Walken shines once again as a reality-show producer, Delroy Lindo provides a solid performance as the bondsman who employs Domino and crew, while former 90210 stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green provide some great comic relief as themselves. But good performances aside, there's just no room to fit all of them. Dabney Coleman, Mo'Nique, Mena Suvari, Lucy Liu — heck, even Tom Waits and Macy Gray — all do a great job, but the focus is off. The focus should be on Domino and her relationship with her adopted and dysfunctional "family" — Ed (a resurgent Mickey Rourke), her mentor and father-figure, and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), their partner, who's desperately in love with Domino. There are glimpses of this, but we are only given this in brief flashes of character development. The three of them might have made a great story, but instead it's wrapped up in a convoluted caper that doesn't seem to know where it is going, and probably never even happened. It may start out as fun, but it slowly dissipates into a mess that's too hard to figure out and too bizarre to care. Sometimes, truth may not be stranger than fiction, but it may be more interesting. Domino is not a bad film, it's just trying too hard to be better than it is. Michael D Friedman is an Atlanta screenwriter and filmmaker. He is a founder and co-president of the Atlanta Screenwriters Group. |
Domino
Directed by: Tony Scott 
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