Film Review - Domino

An acid trip with Domino
By: Rianne Hill Soriano

Starring: Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez
Directed by: Tony Scott
Official Movie site

The life experiences of Domino Harvey have taught her not to invest too much emotion on any certain thing. But she can’t get away with it… And just like this film’s director Tony Scott, looks like he has invested too much emotion in creating the film that the treatment for it turns out to be a bit too loud and exaggerated. Does his style validate any idea of it being: “the only or the best way the story could have ever been told”?

Oozing with tomboy spunkiness, Keira Knightley plays the character of the late Domino Harvey, the daughter of British actor Laurence Harvey, who has turned away from her career as a model to become a bounty hunter. The film revolves around the story of this hot fighter chick after her group’s most recent raid involving $10 million stolen money. The film is overloaded with cutting-edge visuals and stylistic intentions from director Tony Scott (brother of director Ridley Scott) – hand-cranked cameras, jittery zooms, epileptic editing – they all have their good and bad points. Some have been effective for the film as a whole, but a number of them have been extremely jumpy, tends to go overboard and some even tend to become more than just mindless action.

The film is filled with series of disjointed snapshot moments that tend to show off a more altered state of dealing with the story and the audience’s emotions. FBI agent Taryn Miles (Lucy Liu) interviews Domino about her case and other cases to work on involving the stolen $10 million. And from this interview, various flashbacks are shown in snapshots: the recounting of a cute little girl brought up in the upper class society and her moments with her father just before he died; her boring life as a model; her boarding school life; her personal training to become a bounty hunter; her bounty hunter days; her group filming a reality TV show along with two Beverly Hills 90210 actors hired to host the show; plotpoints overfilled with people and things getting shot and smashed up and blown up during bounty hunter-criminal encounters; and in between, the memories are cut to go back to Domino and the FBI agent inside a small room in low-key lighting. And that’s the story. Whether intentionally or not, it seems like the whole film being an interview between Domino and the agent is a near escape to put in the experimental but cluttered visuals that the writer and/or director want/s to make this one story into a film.

There has been too much focus on visual statements as compared to a more creative way of building a good screenplay. A good screenplay could have supported the visual content more effectively and make the film much more worthwhile.

Domino’s tough guy cohorts Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez) give her the chance to fulfill the fun she seeks for – to become a bounty hunter. Ed shines as her bounty hunter mentor and surrogate father figure; while Choco becomes, more than just a teammate, a repressed love of her life. But one thing that has not been clear enough is the vague and sudden entrance of a certain Wanderer (Tom Waits) in one scene as he does his mysterious preacher-like and prophetic monologue about Domino, her group and the society. He suddenly shows up out of the blue to answer all of Domino’s questions when she doesn’t know what to do. It’s like… it has been injected in the script just to put in some good space for cinematic tension and drama. Its weakness hides within its experimental treatment that you tend to mostly see in independent, experimental films and art-house films (but not as excessive as the visuals in this film).

Some of Domino’s repetitive lines about life and death and destiny in the film have been striking and effective: “Heads you win, tails you die… My destiny is life… there is a certain mood and feel (in a considerably favorable taste for cinematic drama) in this part of the film as interpreted by the director.

Watching this film is like an acid trip towards jittery shots, playful visuals, some dark and some warm and saturated colors, low-key lighting, choppy edits and a very bad sound track and musical score in an over-plotted story. You have to start watching the film from the very beginning to give some form of appreciation for it. If you start watching from the middle, it wouldn’t be easy to understand the series of powerful visuals tied together into a cluttered film of snapshots.

The film gives some good statements. It could have been a good film, if not for it becoming overdosed with hyper-stylized visual treatment. It went a bit overboard – just like with the real-life Domino Harvey who was reported to have lost her life because of overdose on a certain drug.

As with Domino’s lines: “Heads you win, tails you die.” Heads you watch, tails you don’t. Heads if you have a hundred bucks to spare; and if you are into experimental visuals more than anything else. Tails if you have a better film worth watching.