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Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Riz Abbasi, Delroy Lindo
Director: Tony Scott
Number of discs: 1
Rated R
New Line Home Video
Run Time: 127 minutes
Domino is a movie that fails on so many levels that it actually becomes painful to watch at time. There are a few redeeming qualities which ought to be enumerated if only for the sake of fair play.
The first and probably most important problem with Domino is that you really do not care one way or another if Domino Harvey lives or dies or whatever else may happen to her. She is a character for whom it is impossible to feel any empathy. The movie makes an effort to build some audience empathy by detailing her relationship with her father who died when Domino was young, her mother (a bitch of course) and her affection for goldfish. The problem of course is that we know that, that is exactly what the movie is trying to do: Make us like someone who is not a likeable person. When you have an entire Hollywood production, one of the finest young actresses working, a gifted director and God only knows how much money being thrown at a movie and none of this can make a character likeable one has to wonder what they were like in real life.
Domino the movie and the character is a mess. The movie is all over the place being told in an episodic series of flashbacks which simultaneously are supposed to be from a first person perspective but are told from a third person perspective: Someone never learned the difference in high school it seems. In a seeming desire to lend authenticity to the movie the washed out colours and lighting give off a feeling of oppressive heat as a constant companion. Add to this oppressive feeling Scott’s love of the jump cut and the 2 second scene and you have a movie that was designed for people with the attention span of chipmunks on speed. So to sum it up you have a character you don't care about, machine gun directing style, washed out colours and violence for its own sake.
There is a redeeming factor in Domino – the acting. Keira Knightly and Mickey Rourke are superb in roles which are long on attitude and short on script. Both actors deliver solid performances which is a great credit to their acting skills. It has been a long time since Rourke was in such a high profile movie – it’s too bad it turned out to be such a disappointment.
Do yourself a favour – give Domino a pass and watch Dog The Bounty Hunter on A&E. Dog may not be the most exciting television out there but at least it really is authentic and that is something you just cannot say about Domino.