A chaotic, colorful thriller
Tony Scott doesn’t make movies. He makes grand mal seizures, loud, dizzy blizzards of music, violence and too many edits to count.
“Domino,” his latest, aims to be another “True Romance.” It’s a goofy and bloody and assaultive all-star extravaganza, and an absurd burlesque of the life of movie-star daughter and model-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey.
It is “based on a true story,” the longest opening credits in recent memory tell us. “Sort of.” Try “not in the least.”
Domino, played with a tough-girl pose by waif Keira Knightley, rejects the life of comfort and social graces that her birth guaranteed and dives into the dark side.
When other girls were picking out prom dresses, she was practicing with her nunchuks. She tried college, only to bust the nose of a sorority sister with the temerity to haze her. She took a shot at modeling, but fistfights don’t go over on the catwalk.
And when this skinny, scantily clad riot girl checks out a seminar on bounty hunting, run by Ed (Mickey Rourke) and the shady bail bondsman Claremont (Delroy Lindo), she’s found her niche. So what if her partner Choco (Edgar Ramirez) doesn’t know how to act around her? She’s done her time at the Beverly Hills Gun Club. She can handle a street-sweeper or service revolver with the best of them.
We follow, in Scott’s a-million-edits-will-hide-the- stupid-script style, their adventures as they have showdowns with gangs (a lap dance saves the day), catch bail jumpers and are followed by a reality TV show hosted by two ex-“Beverly Hills 90210” has-beens (Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green).
But when we meet Domino, one job has gone terribly wrong. Domino narrates her story, the one she won’t tell the police psychiatrist (Lucy Liu). It’s an insanely complicated tale involving DMV scammers, double-crosses, an inside-job armored car robbery and the mob. We know somebody’s lost an arm. And knowing Scott, we’re sure to see how.
The multi-handed script didn’t give Scott much help, but he knows how to electro-shock such action-film cliches as stand-offs, shoot-outs and Winnebago wrecks. The best jokes in the movie are the self-referential ones.
They even kid on Knightley’s swizzle-stick figure:
“What’s it like to have the body of a 10-year-old boy?”
Screen vets Rourke and Christopher Walken (as a breathless TV producer) know how to register in the muddle of the edits and mayhem surrounding them. And maybe it’s just that editing, but Knightley does look as if she could bust a guy’s nose.
The real Domino Harvey was a self-mythologizing, drug- addicted lesbian who died of an overdose last June. She was 35. She may have exaggerated her modeling career. She recently had been busted for drugs, and was said to be pretty unhappy with the liberties taken with her misspent life by the filmmakers.
But she shouldn’t have been. Whatever else Scott and the scribes did to Domino, they at least tried to make a heroine out of her. That is more, apparently, than she was able to do for herself.