And They All Fall Down...
Tony Scott's "Domino" is an interesting misfire. (Film Review)
The Upside: If you like your movies at an MTV pace.
The Downside: It might be time to put Tony Scott on Ritalin.
Okay, I'm not exactly sure what Tony Scott's been smoking, but I think it's time for him to share. He's never been what you would call a "modest" filmmaker- older brother Ridley has the lion's share of classics under his belt (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator), but Tony has always been the stylist. Back in the 80s when he applied his wax and gloss to movies with no other form or substance like Top Gun or Beverly Hills Cop II, he created Frankenstein's monsters that could be used as Exhibit A in an argument about everything that is wrong with slash-n-dash Hollywood. But it's only been just over a decade since Tony Scott's one true masterpiece, Quentin Tarantino's wild and heady road trip/crime spree pic True Romance, and what followed, at least for a time, was a string of films like Crimson Tide and Spy Game that managed to borrow from the best of both worlds- indulgance in Scott's gift of visual gab married to plotlines that, while certainly not Shakespeare, didn't make us feel guilty as we got up to throw our popcorn bags away.
I admit it- I like it when directors find new and different ways to dress a scene or compose a story, which is why, even a year and a half later, I still oscillate in my opinions about Man on Fire; one hand, thinking it was a chronic case of a clever director thinking he was just a tad too clever, and thinking it was a brash and bloody take of a genre that could use all the innovation it can get. Kind of the same thing I think about Domino, but unlike the sublime passions a love/hate movie can stir up, here the needle rests just a little closer to the middle.
"Based on a true story... sort of," the title cards tell us in the opening, although if they didn't, it really wouldn't matter- you may like it, you may not, but the only people who might walk out of it not realizing that it is 98% government inspected ham are the same people who, like one character in the film, believe that the Jerry Springer Show is an important social medium. Yes, Domino Harvey was a real person (she took her own life this summer at the age of 35), the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, who played the brainwashed American soldier in The Manchurian Candidate. And yes, she did become a bounty hunter after a troubled childhood and attempts to start a career as a model. But when a two-hour supposed "bio-pic" jams in plotlines of everything from mobbed up casinos, stolen mob cash, a dying child, and a gang of stick-up men who disguise themselves as former first ladies, you know you're taking a trip into Scott's land of heightened surreality.
The obvious bull**** isn't a sticking point for me. At least every moment of Domino winks and scoffs at the idea of painting an accurate and objective picture of a little girl lost who found her father-figures among those who tangle with the meanest of the mean streets on an everyday basis, a degree of self-deprecation I would have appreciated from last month's The Exorcism of Emily Rose which fooled more than a few into thinking its fictitious plot was on the level. And there's the understandable frustration at the idea that every tale about a larger-than-life personality has to line up like an accountant's ledger. If every story had to be so accurate, we wouldn't have cultural icons like Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, who actually lived to see their mystique jet past the bounds of reality. Given that Domino Harvey was a close, personal friend of Scott's, there's the reassuring feeling that while Domino may hardly be a true story, it is how Domino would have wanted it told.
So I don't have any problems with Domino Harvey's story being translated into a flashy, kinetic potboiler. But Domino itself, despite its overwrought plumbing, comes in a few meters shorter than satisfying than a movie with this much Rube Goldberg inspiration ought to. Scott's always been kind of the anti-Jim Jarmusch, looping his films together in eye-blink seven-second takes that seem to have been edited by a particularly dutiful sushi chef. And Scott carries over a lot of his tricks from Man on Fire- scenes that seem to bleach and change shades like overexposed film, subtitles that not only scroll across the screen and appear in different fonts, but are used to put a rubber stamp on things characters say in English. It's a lot of fury to diminishing effect. Domino is pretty fun to watch, if you can get yourself to believe that the visual tomfoolery is more asset than distraction, but the feeling of it depresses like a deflated kickball not long after you leave the theater and then get to wonder if you've just seen a culmination of Scott's work that, unfortunately, doesn't add up to the sum of its parts.
Recounting the plot of Domino would probably require a flowchart (should we be a little scared that the movie actually resorts to using one to keep track of itself a couple of times?) and discussing the characters would be like reading down an elementary school class roll, so I'll save everyone the exhaustion. When it isn't setting up Domino's life of rebelling against her fashion model mother (Jacqueline Bisset) and how she falls in with two of the baddest bounty hunters in L.A.- gruff, crumbly Ed (Mickey Rourke) and shy-yet-borderline-psychotic Choco (Edgar Ramirez), it cooks up a pulpy crime story involving a knocked-over armored car job which may or may not be an inside job and a DMV fake-ID scam that's the brainchild of a pair of bratty sons of a local mob boss. Richard Kelley's (Donnie Darko) screenplay just about chuckles and beams with self-satisfaction at its own dark-as-night humor and pretzel logic, and a special ribbon has to be given a howler of a scene where Domino hurls a knife through two con-men's windshield screaming, "These people paid for a seminar!" But even the Mad Hatter-as-director persona that Scott seems more and more intent on nursing gets a little dry after a while. A moment in which a Bible-preaching mystic (Tom Waits) appears to Domino and her drugged-out cronies in the desert seems like it was dragged in whole from another film and the climax officially makes Domino the third Tony Scott movie to end with various groups of heavily armed men in one room, pointing guns and ready to blow everyone else away.
Adverse to do anything lightly, Scott plunges whole-hog into the kind of Chuck Palahniuk-esque gory satire that any film that tries to balance roaring shotguns and reality TV would be ripe for. The midway mark introduces Mark Heiss (Christopher Walken), a producer who wants to make Domino and her clan the centers of a blood spattered Cops rip-off. The sub-plot is underused, considering one of the best lines in Domino's trailer ("Use nun-chucks. Nun-chucks are good.") is left out of the final edit. But Domino does get in an extra dose of Tinseltown-bashing by digging up Beverly Hills 90210 veterans Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green and throwing them into the mix as "celebrity hostages" who have the bizarre theory that people won't kill someone else when a celebrity is around.
Scott's pick of faces is functional, although Domino is the kind of film that would work or fail within its bounds despite a variety of people sitting in the parts. Keira Knightly makes a convincing badass, but don't look for her trying to push this movie in tandem when she begins promoting Pride and Prejudice. Rourke seems a little more at home, between this and Sin City reclaiming the mantle of an old-fashioned Hollywood tough guy rather than the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.
I wanted to like Domino more than I did- too much of it is show and even that much seems like the same cabaret we've seen before from Scott. Not a moment of Domino is boring, but little of it is memorable, either. Despite his ceaseless, manic energy, Scott still can't seem to imbue his creation with the same breathless life and cresting vibe of a real woman who made her life at the barrel of a gun. B-
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