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Mickey Rourke, from left, Brian Austin Green, Keira Knightley and Ian Zierling in New Line Cinema's release of "Domino."Review
Excessive 'Domino' falls down in every direction
The story isn't the only thing scattered in this action film based on real-life events.
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"Domino," director Tony Scott's hyperactive, roll-in-the-mud, blow-stuff-up and jiggle the cameras every which way extravaganza, is one of the most awesomely awful films ever made.
Or awfully awesome. It is so stylishly self-indulgent, so over-the-top, so cheeky and full of itself that it's both hard to watch and hard to stop watching.
Oh, and it's based on a true story. Sort of. Actually, it's based on a true character, and the story goes spinning off to Mars.
Domino Harvey was -- in real life she passed away this summer -- the daughter of British actor Laurence Harvey. As played by Keira Knightley with bony arrogance and gobs of mascara, Domino is something of a juvenile delinquent, then she's a model, then she's an out-and-out tattooed, foul-mouthed full-time bad girl.
On a whim she decides to check out the occupation of bounty hunting, and she hooks up with Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez). Ed is a brutish legend, Choco is his brooding sidekick. Domino soon proves she has all the guts and stupidity it takes to play their game, and within a couple of years she's something of a legend, too.
This leads a reality TV producer (Christopher Walken) to try and make a show out of following the trio around. He hires a couple of semicelebs to host (real semi-celebs Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering), and off they go in an RV to catch some action.
Unfortunately, the action gets way too hot (and way too complicated) way too fast. It all involves fake IDs, stolen mob money, kidnapped college kids, an Afghani freedom fighter, a Las Vegas casino and lots and lots of bullets and explosions.
The entirety of this tale is told by Domino to a dimly lit FBI agent played by Lucy Liu. That way we get lots of close-ups of Domino's sexy-bloodied face and tattoos.
This could end up a headache movie for a whole lot of people. Trying to follow the incredibly convoluted plot once it shows up is like trying to work your brain into the shape of a pretzel. And trying to believe stick-limbed Knightley as a gun-blasting, face-punching fighting machine takes some consciousness-stretching as well.
But it's the dazzling, often maddening style of Scott's direction that's going to have some people grabbing their eyeballs. Over the past decade, Scott ("Top Gun," "True Romance, "Man on Fire") has gone plain gonzo, shaking cameras like maracas, sending dialogue back and forth through echo machines, splattering sentences graphically across the screen and bathing scenes in so many different lighting effects that watching one of his movies has become akin to being trapped in a hall of mirrors.
All these acrobatics might serve some purpose if there was any apparent meaning or depth in "Domino," but instead this film simply seems to exist as a means for Scott to delight himself. You don't really care for Domino or any of these people at any time. You just wish the camera would stay still.
Some will doubtlessly delight in the down and dirty jitteriness of it all. This is, after all, a hot babe with tattoos shooting big guns. So why isn't it more exciting?
Could it be that by making much ado about nothing Tony Scott has undercut the primal pleasures of sex and violence? Is this big mess of a movie simply too loud and dumb for its own good ?
The simple answer: Yes.
You can reach Tom Long at (313) 222-8879 or tlong@detnews.com.
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