DOMINO is dreck. That the late, flamboyant Laurence Harvey’s daughter Domino went from the surreal showbiz world of a privileged, screwed-up daughter of a famous actor to being a real life working bounty hunter (still screwed-up) has some fleeting tabloid interest. She died at 35, from a drug overdose, a few months before this 2005 movie was released. The two pieces of fate trivia carry more lasting impact within this paragraph than in any time spent undergoing the brain-deadening, nerve-jangling, spirit-sapping 127 minutes of gross, vapid characters, foul, ugly mayhem and attention-deficit editing and direction that turned this into an ignominious and deserved flop.
Director Tony Scott brought his trademark razzle-dazzle visual sense to bear, but it’s amped up to such a degree that it rapidly becomes a confused, boring blur, as Domino (Keira Knightley, slumming like to the glory-hole born) kicks, shoots and swears her way around an estimable collection of co-stars, all of whom are worth watching in any other movie but this one.
Reviews were scathing, and a box-office beat-down of $22,000,000 against a cost of $50,000,000 wasn’t half punishment enough. Easily Scott’s worst film. He voiced: “I hung out with these bounty hunters who were all coked up all the time – they’re all on speed or meth – and the movie was a product of my research. Everything in the way I shoot the movie is dictated by the world when I touch it, so we had ride-alongs with bounty hunters who were [sniffing like crazy] in the back, and it’s a product of that. But I think I was wrong. I didn’t let the movie breathe enough. The script was great – Richard Kelly wrote a great script – and I got overcome by the insanity of the world I was touching. I think I fucked up on that one.”
Yes, and yes, except for the part about the script, which is terrible. Oh, and–sorry, guys– that’s a stunt double doing Keira’s lapdance for the gang bangers, who were the real deal hired for the shoot: she was apparently too spooked by them to do it herself. Fair enough: it’s the kind of flick that would best appeal to cracked-out street slime. And I say this as a Guy who’s usually all-in for hot chicks rocking firepower: Scarlett, Charlize, Angelina, Jennifer—I just want to pretend to care a portion of an iota about their travails between volleys and hope the director and editor give me more than 1/5th of a second to register each shotgun cock.
Fully wasted: Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo, Mo’Nique, Riz Abbasi, Lucy Liu, Dabney Coleman, Macy Gray, Christopher Walken, Jacqueline Bisset, Mena Suvari, Tom Waits, Jerry Springer and Dale Dickey. Crud.
