InsidePulse Review – Domino

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Image courtesy of www.impawards.com

Director :

Tony Scott

Cast :

Keira Knightley……….Domino Harvey
Mickey Rourke……….Ed
Edgar Ramirez……….Choco
Lucy Liu……….Taryn Miles
Claremont Williams……….Delroy Lindo

Domino appears to be a victim of the best of intentions by Tony Scott. Having received critical acclaim for 2004’s Man on Fire in both substance and style categories, Scott applies the same sort of heavy-handed direction and Quentin Tarantino inspired soundtrack insertion for the unlikely story of a female bounty hunter named Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley).

Harvey was the daughter of actor Lawrence Harvey, best known for his role opposite Frank Sinatra in the original The Manchurian Candidate. A former Ford agency model, Harvey would run afoul of the FBI due to various drug connections and was later found dead due to an accidental drug overdose. In Scott’s vision, Harvey is the sort of disaffected, disengaged youth looking for some thrills that’s hard to identify with. Knightley, most likely to receive an Academy Award nomination for her role in the forthcoming update of Pride & Prejudice, chomps scenery with great abandon as the infamous bounty hunter.

Harvey just wants to have “some fun” and enrolls in a bounty-hunting seminar hosted by the legendary Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo). Falling in with Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), she pursues an unlikely career hunting down criminals before an awkward set of circumstances places her in front of an FBI agent (Lucy Liu) and a lot of dead bodies to account for, telling its narrative in various flashbacks. With a massive cast of supporting characters that shuffle in and out, some well-placed comedic moments to break the tension and some good follow-through, Tony Scott has the tools for an engaging story.

And on the surface, Domino should be a great story on its merits alone. Even with the invention of large parts of the story for dramatic purpose, there is a lot to be said about various themes of life through this particular story. It could be about how wealth doesn’t always bring about happiness or mental well being, about satisfying your parents, or even a modest biopic about one of the most unlikely stories of the past 20 years. But Scott (who isn’t the most even-handed of directors) takes the bare bones of the story, meshes it with the visual style of Man on Fire and turns out a film that is so loud and obnoxious that it really isn’t so much fun as it is excessively mind-boggling. This is a shame, really, because it spoils a solid performance from its anchor in Knightley as the title character.

It’s a role she fits comfortably well in; having earned her status with non-traditional female lead roles (Bend it like Beckham) and more traditional ones (Pirates of the Caribbean), Knightley’s petite stature might be dwarfed by her two larger co-stars but she dominates the screen by sheer force of will. She’s not a bad person, or even a bad cliché; she’s someone who doesn’t fit in who finds something and someplace where she does. It’s just no matter how hard she tries, Scott’s sledgehammer approach to Domino is mind-numbing at best and headache-inducing at worst.

Taking a cue from Man on Fire, Scott loads up his movie with the same sort of style. There’s lot of pop music inserted, lots of quick cuts and edits as well as fancy camera tricks and interesting angles. But while copying Man on Fire in terms of style may be one thing, Scott goes overboard with the homage. Every scene has this style; trying to follow what is going on becomes almost secondary to the sort of audio-visual trick Scott wants to use next. The story becomes secondary as well to the MTV-inspired shenanigans, and it’s not a very good one to start with.

There is no focus in Scott’s narrative about the life of Domino Harvey. She does things, things happen to her, there’s lot of cursing and gunfire but there is no underlying focus on the sort of story he wants to tell. There are a lot of directions he could have taken the underlying current that exists just due to the circumstances of her birth, but Scott seems more focused on what he’s doing to jar the viewing experience as opposed to telling a story. It’s a case of events happening that all are related as opposed to building or developing something, anything, to draw the viewer in.