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Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley) was the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey. When he passed away, Domino moved around with her socialite mother (Jacqueline Bisset) substituting Beverly Hills socialism for fist and weapons training. At a bogus seminar calling out for bounty hunters, Domino meets Ed (Mickey Rourke), Choco (Edgar Ramirez) and famous bail bondsman, Claremont Williams III (Delroy Lindo). Soon she’s going on runs with them, exchanges lap dances for information and becomes "Bounty Hunter of the year."

All of this is expedited through with about as much efficiency as a speed freak on acid. And this is before Scott throws in a Mescaline trip after ninety minutes of wondering if our eyes need laser surgery. As if going through the cadre of Oliver Stone’s camera tricks since 1991, Scott blurs the screen until all focus is lost, literally and figuratively. It’s time to retire the grainy cutaways in action scenes. This was never a good idea to begin with and even more infuriating with a director capable of so much more. And we’re still approaching the thirty-minute mark on a film which stretches to nearly two whole hours.

What suffices for a plot hereafter is an indecipherable mess involving fake IDs, inside jobs, reality TV, the mob, mistaken identities, celebrity hostages and Tom Waits. But that’s simplifying. An armored truck holding ten million dollars belonging to the owner of Las Vegas’ Stratosphere hotel (a nice welcome back to Dabney Coleman) is robbed by a gang of four pulling a fun reversal on Point Break’s ex-Presidents. Claremont offers to stick his bounty hunters on the case for their usual finder’s fee while Domino wonders why the four they’re after have no criminal records. This all takes place amidst a TV producer (Christopher Walken) designing a Dog the Bounty Hunter show around their exploits. Blah, blah, I could explain this all day but the film is intent on doing it all by itself with filmstock reversals and doublecrosses which only further complicate matters from “I didn’t really care in the first place” to “so who really gives a crap at this point?”

Assuming Richard “Donnie Darko” Kelly wanted to play within the kind of reality-switching that worked well in say the Andy Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon - its impossible to understand why the approach was taken if all Tony Scott was going to do was bombast our senses with little attention to what Domino’s story (real or fake) was all about. An encyclopedic approach is all someone like Domino may need, but consider how interesting real her story must have been to demand making a point that what we’re about to see is based on true events “sort of?” There’s little left to an audience’s imagination for puzzle-piecing what’s reality and what’s fiction when you climax with nearly destroying the Stratosphere hotel and dropping helicopters onto Las Vegas Blvd. I’ll admit such a blast would make the roller coaster on top the hotel a bit more exciting but it does nothing to enhance the one we’re supposed to be watching.

Knightley throws herself into the role of Domino and despite being the sexy British beanpole of the moment, unabashedly pulls it off as a tough-lookin’, butt-kickin’ femme fatale. It’s too bad that’s about all she’s allowed to do since the extent of her inner personality is a repeating monologue for those who missed it the first time – the first time. Tony Scott has made some very entertaining pieces of excessive entertainment in the past decade including Enemy of the State, Spy Game, the fantastic Crimson Tide and Man On Fire which out-Punisher’ed The Punisher. So why does he seem stuck in True Romance mode again? Even Tarantino has moved on from the Mexican Standoffs and moved over to Asia. As an action film, it’s the most incompetent piece of work on Scott’s resume. As a satire on fiction intruding on the reality we view, it’s barely a spinoff from The Surreal Life. The real Domino Harvey was found drowned in a bathtub just weeks before the film was originally supposed to open in August (later found to be the result of an overdose.) Surely, any real-life story which ends in such a mysterious tragedy has more depth and excitement to deserve something a bit greater than a sendoff with a helicopter crashing down behind her.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13168&reviewer=198
originally posted: 10/14/05 14:26:17
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