Director Report Card: Tony Scott (2005)

13. Domino

Around 1994, Tony Scott read an article about Domino Harvey. Harvey was the daughter of well known actor Laurence Harvey but, after working briefly as a model, she rejected her family's glamorous life style. In an unexpected turn of events, she would instead begin operating as a bounty hunter. Intrigued by what he read, Scott would meet with Domino and secure the film rights to her life story. The project then spent a decade in development hell, with names like Sharon Stone and Jennifer Lopez being considered for the title role. Scott's “Domino” wouldn't get rolling until Richard Kelly, the director of “Donnie Darko,” was hired to completely rewrite the script. “Domino” would finally blasts into theaters in 2005.

In its opening minutes, “Domino” refers to itself as “based on a true story. Sort of.” Scott and Kelly would use the facts in Miss Harvey's life as the foundation for a wild crime saga. After her rebellious ways got her kicked out of modeling school and college, Domino finds a newspaper ad for a bounty hunting seminar. Teaming up with an eccentric band led by Ed Moseby and Choco, Domino is soon finding her hunger for danger and excitement satisfied. Soon, Domino's team is recruited to star in a reality TV show. The bounty hunters unknowingly stumble upon a complicated scheme involving forged driver's license, money stolen from an army truck, a group of robbers dressed like First Ladies, and the mafia. Everything goes pear-shaped inside a Las Vegas high-rise casino.

Scott made “Domino” directly after “Man on Fire” and, it brings me no pleasure to report this, shares the exact same visual quirks. This film's style is similarly extreme. There are snap zooms, mixtures of fast and slow motion, montages with trailing imagery, visual and audio distortion, and random color changes. Once again, text will appear on-screen from time-to-time. Another thing “Domino” has in common with “Man on Fire” is, even when its standing still, the movie looks washed-out, gritty, and sun-bathed. The soundtrack is absolutely intrusive as well. As if there was any doubt Tony was indulging himself here, there's also multiple shots of helicopters flying over a city. “Man on Fire” presumably looked this way to reflect the protagonist's fractured mind. Supposedly “Domino” looks this way to reflect the coke-fueled mindset of bounty hunters... Except we never see the film's heroes do drugs, so the obnoxious visual style feels totally excessive and self-indulgent.

“Man on Fire's” annoying visuals were at least linked to a story that was easy to get invested in and understand. “Domino,” meanwhile, drops its characters down into a convoluted crime plot that is told in a nonlinear fashion. We begin in the middle, Domino narrating her own story to the FBI agent interviewing her. (A framing device the film cuts back to on numerous occasion.) The film then works back to where we came in and then going onward. Yet “Domino” is not content simply jumping around in time. Its convoluted plot involves multiple parties pursuing different goals. The film is judicial about what information it reveals at what times, in hopes of surprising us. All this really ends up doing is confusing us. “Domino's” story is not that complicated, once you read it as a Wikipedia article, but it's a lot harder to follow as you watch it play out.

Trying to make heads-or-tails of “Domino's” plot is not helped by the movie making a number of plot irrelevant digressions. A supporting character, played by Mo'nique, goes on “The Jerry Spring Show” and delivers a tasteless dissertation on names for mixed race individuals. This feels like one of Oscar-winning thespian Mo'nique's stand-up bits inserted into the movie, for no particular reason. Probably the movie's most pointless sequence has everyone in the R.V. with Domino being dosed with mescaline. The drug trip that follows affects the story in no way whatsoever. This scene also features a cameo from Tom Waits as some sort of spirit guide who croaks vaguely spiritual wisdom. There's also exploding trailers, murder scenes we later learn didn't actually happen, and visits to a sex addiction recovery seminar thrown into the movie. Why is this stuff in the movie? It's the definition of self-indulgent.

Then again, that superfluous Jerry Springer sequence is almost like a key to understand the whole movie's tone. Despite starring a character that began her life in high society, “Domino” is largely concerned with trashy people. Mo'nique's character, in a vaguely racist and totally unnecessary plot point, is also the record holder for being the world's youngest grandmother. At one point, Choco storms into Ed's apartment, who is watching porn. The two almost comes to blow over pointless relationship drama. There's an extended subplot involving a trailer park resident whose arm gets severed, for fuzzy reasons, in the grisliest manner possible. “Domino” has a fascination with grotesque behavior like this, the motivations of which I can only speculate upon.

I guess this might be because “Domino's” story also involves reality television. An eccentric TV executives decides following around a group of bounty hunters, which includes a former model/minor celebrity, might be a good premise for a reality show. The drama that Domino and her team experience in their (very dramatic) day-to-day lives are captured by the cameramen.... But only for a couple of scenes. In a slightly obnoxious meta-touch, Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green appear as highly exaggerated versions of themselves. This plot point is dropped long before we get to the explosion-filled final shoot-out in the casino. Which makes you wonder what the entire point of this subplot was in the first place! Ziering and Green, doing standard riffs on the conceited Hollywood actor idea, provide some comic relief but that's about their sole contribution to the overall movie.

So let's talk about that casino shoot-out. As in “True Romance,” Tony Scott ends a movie by having all of the movie's subplots – or most of them, in this case – collide violently at the climax of the story. The mafia, the casino owner, the cops, and the bounty hunters all end up gunning each other down inside the Space Needle-like dome of the Stratosphere. By this point, the movie's narrative has become a knotted-up mess. You can untangle it but you really can't be asked to care that much. The movie's visuals, already ugly and disjointed, also become completely incomprehensible at this point. I re-watched the violent sequence three times in an attempt to figure out exactly what happened and I'm still not sure. 

For most of its run time, “Domino” is trying to be funny, I think. Its self-consciously outrageous content, I'm guessing, was intended to make the audience laugh. Or at least chuckle in disbelief, in a “that's so fucked-up!” kind of way. So much of the movie is so knowingly ridiculous... Which makes “Domino's” attempt to become very serious in its last third all the stranger. Much like “Man on Fire,” the film attempts to make a point about a universal theme. The line “Heads, you live. Tails, you die” is repeated over and over again. How random chance affects our lives is the intended goal. Yet to be hit with something so serious after ninety minutes of flippant nonsense feels like a slap in the face. And all the dying declarations of love – because the movie really does roll one of those out – in the world can't change that. 

About the only thing “Domino” really has in its favor is a very capable cast. Keira Knightly stars as the titular character. And Keira Knightly is very sexy. She spends long stretches of the movie in skin-tight clothing of some sort. She gets a witness to cooperate by giving him a lap dance. There's lingering shots of her ass, bikini-clad pool splashing, and a sex scene in the middle of the desert. It would feel gross if Keira Knightly's sex appeal wasn't so powerful. She's confident and energetic. When Domino punches people in the nose, which she does several times as an expression of her attitude, you believe her. Her non-stop sexiness is also a part of a fiercely independent need to express herself, so it actually makes sense. Knightly successfully pulls off this blend of sex kitten and bad-ass bitch. The parts of the movie that are watchable are mostly because of her.

Sadly, no matter how charismatic Knightly is, she can't salvage the movie's utterly anemic love story. Édgar Ramírez plays Choco. Choco doesn't speak much English and flirts with a lot of female characters over the course of the movie... Despite that, at some point, “Domino” randomly decides to throw him and the title character together as lovers. This is despite Knightly and Ramirez sharing few scenes together by this point. That's no fault of the actors. Ramirez is sort of funny with a few of the lines he has. Knightly, of course, has enough smolder to have chemistry with anyone. There's simply no reason for these characters to fall in love with each other. Any time the movie turns to focus on that, it drags to a halt.

“Domino” also shares a couple of cast members with “Man on Fire” as well. Christopher Walken appears as the easily angered network executive, doing the exact – hilarious – things you expect from Christopher Walken. Mickey Rouke plays Ed, providing a sleazy and decidedly Mickey-Rourke-like take on the role of a mentor. Also in the cast is Lucy Liu, as the agent interviewing Domino after the fact. This framing device is fairly useless but Liu is always a delight, especially in stern and serious roles like this. I also liked a very over-the-top Delroy Lindo as the bail bondsman that helps fund the bounty hunters. 

For any Richard Kelly fans curious about “Domino,” you can feel some of the writer/director's sensibilities inside the film. A mob boss who takes phone calls inside a glass bubble deep within his swimming pool, to get around police surveillance, feels like something that could exist in “Southland Tales.” And I guess weird tonal shifts are a trademark of his as well. Though perhaps those were unavoidable in this case. The real Domino Harvey died of a drug overdose while the movie inspired by her life was in post-production. You can't very well make a movie about how exciting and fun someone's life was when they self-destructed a few months before the film is released. Even absorbed outside of that context, “Domino” is a relentlessly noisy and messy movie that can only be enjoyed in short bursts. That's largely thanks to the limitless charms of Keira Knightly and a few other cast members and almost nothing else. [Grade: C-]