Friday, May 12, 2006
Domino (2005)
Once in a while, an artist friend and I get together, grab a video camera, and make movies. Nothing too fancy, mind you, with budgets as low as $0, but we’ve turned out some interesting stuff. Little action pieces, parodies, weird editing, bizarre colors, and surrealism permeate every frame of our makeshift experiments, which may or may not be loosely connected to each other.
Director Tony Scott is unapologetic in his use of these techniques for Domino, a film so hyper-kinetic that it doesn’t stay still long enough to be assigned a genre. There may be a story buried underneath mountains of unprocessed film, but a plot definitely does exist, though not one that can be made sense of. Reflecting on it, I’ve concluded that it wasn’t meant to make sense; in the same way action films use plot as a clothesline to hang action scenes on, Domino uses plot to hang a dozens of frantically edited snippets of cinema.
I do mean dozens. By the closing credits, the audience has seen shootouts, explosions, sex scenes, pornography, severed limbs, thievery, Jerry Springer, detailed discussions on race mixing, satire of reality TV, satire of upper-class British families, religious commentary, scores of different color filters, bank robbers dressed as living first ladies, lots of subtitles, computerized visual aides, and Mickey Rourke. In short, meet Tony Scott, the world’s most experienced, well-budgeted film student.
Domino Harvey (Kiera Knightly), the film’s primary reoccurring character, serves as the nexus of the swirling insanity. The wealthy daughter of an old movie star (The Manchurian Candidate’s Laurence Harvey), Domino joins Ed (Mickey Rourke), the world’s ugliest bounty hunter, to become the world’s prettiest bounty hunter. What possesses her to abandon a comfortable life to get in the dirt with society’s dregs? An interesting question, but the film doesn’t care, because such an answer could take more than a shot of Domino punching out frat girls to understand.
Kiera Knightly gets the role half-right, half-wrong. The bitchy part she has down pat, but she looks too much like a cute girl at a costume party with a biker theme. Looking at Domino, one never gets the impression that this 100 pound girl could seriously stand up to Mexican gang bangers and mobsters, who could snap her in half like a Popsicle stick without a second thought. There are successful female bounty hunters working today, but I doubt many of them try to pay their tipsters in lap dances.
It may sound like I dislike the film, but perhaps I am being glib. While it possesses the attention span of a gnat and spends two hours assaulting our senses with barely comprehensible vignettes, there exists a palatable talent underneath the mayhem. I’ve seen films by terrible directors, and Domino clearly wasn’t made by one of them. The wild variety exhibited from frame to frame couldn’t be done by a hack. Only a good filmmaker with an unfortunate lack of focus could make this, an explosive mess that manages to be entertaining by the sheer power of its scattergun approach to storytelling. I’m hopeful that next time, Tony Scott will pay less attention to the editing machine and a bit more to the typewriter.
2.5 out of 5
Director Tony Scott is unapologetic in his use of these techniques for Domino, a film so hyper-kinetic that it doesn’t stay still long enough to be assigned a genre. There may be a story buried underneath mountains of unprocessed film, but a plot definitely does exist, though not one that can be made sense of. Reflecting on it, I’ve concluded that it wasn’t meant to make sense; in the same way action films use plot as a clothesline to hang action scenes on, Domino uses plot to hang a dozens of frantically edited snippets of cinema.
I do mean dozens. By the closing credits, the audience has seen shootouts, explosions, sex scenes, pornography, severed limbs, thievery, Jerry Springer, detailed discussions on race mixing, satire of reality TV, satire of upper-class British families, religious commentary, scores of different color filters, bank robbers dressed as living first ladies, lots of subtitles, computerized visual aides, and Mickey Rourke. In short, meet Tony Scott, the world’s most experienced, well-budgeted film student.
Domino Harvey (Kiera Knightly), the film’s primary reoccurring character, serves as the nexus of the swirling insanity. The wealthy daughter of an old movie star (The Manchurian Candidate’s Laurence Harvey), Domino joins Ed (Mickey Rourke), the world’s ugliest bounty hunter, to become the world’s prettiest bounty hunter. What possesses her to abandon a comfortable life to get in the dirt with society’s dregs? An interesting question, but the film doesn’t care, because such an answer could take more than a shot of Domino punching out frat girls to understand.
Kiera Knightly gets the role half-right, half-wrong. The bitchy part she has down pat, but she looks too much like a cute girl at a costume party with a biker theme. Looking at Domino, one never gets the impression that this 100 pound girl could seriously stand up to Mexican gang bangers and mobsters, who could snap her in half like a Popsicle stick without a second thought. There are successful female bounty hunters working today, but I doubt many of them try to pay their tipsters in lap dances.
It may sound like I dislike the film, but perhaps I am being glib. While it possesses the attention span of a gnat and spends two hours assaulting our senses with barely comprehensible vignettes, there exists a palatable talent underneath the mayhem. I’ve seen films by terrible directors, and Domino clearly wasn’t made by one of them. The wild variety exhibited from frame to frame couldn’t be done by a hack. Only a good filmmaker with an unfortunate lack of focus could make this, an explosive mess that manages to be entertaining by the sheer power of its scattergun approach to storytelling. I’m hopeful that next time, Tony Scott will pay less attention to the editing machine and a bit more to the typewriter.
2.5 out of 5
# posted by James : 4:04 PM
