 |
Friday, October 14, 2005
Absurd 'Domino' is no game -- it's a disaster
Tony Scott's new movie, "Domino," is so staggeringly awful -- such an ordeal to sit through -- that it's hard to know where to start talking about it. The experience of the movie is like having someone hit you on the side of the head with a brick for two hours.
 | MOVIE REVIEW | ||
| |||
View all photosIt purports to be the reasonably true story of Domino Harvey, the bounty-hunter daughter of movie star Laurence Harvey, but it's actually a huge pile of Hollywood baloney culminating with an absurd, WWII-scale battle atop the Las Vegas Stratosphere Tower.
The script is built around an armored-car heist and told in flashback from a police interrogation, but the caper is incredibly dull and uninvolving, and the plot is such a convoluted mess that you can't even begin to figure out what's happening.
On a parallel track, and with a repulsive twist to every scene, the script also flashes back to tell Domino's story -- movie-star father dies when she's a toddler, Beverly Hills upbringing, brief fling as a model, answers ad for training to be a bail bondsman.
Scott calls the style of the movie a "punk rock fever dream," but it's more like someone let a chimpanzee loose in the editing room. With its zillions of nerve-jangling cuts, repeated scenes and unnecessary subtitles, it could be the most ineptly overedited movie of all time.
It's out to be the last word in in-your-face punk edginess but it comes across as a total affectation on the part of the 61-year-old British director ("Top Gun" "Crimson Tide") -- less hip, imitation-Tarantino cool than a case of premature senility.
Kiera Knightley, who must weigh all of 80 pounds and can't keep down her upper-class British accent for an instant, is simply ludicrous in the role. All tattooed up, with a perpetual cigarette in her mouth, she comes across as a 12-year-old trying to be Madonna for Halloween.
As a biopic, the movie is even more of a travesty. We have little sense of her environmental pressures or internal landscape: she's just a spoiled, shallow poseur. The real Domino died in June at the age of 35 of "undisclosed" causes. Possibly she caught an early cut of the movie.
My web site
My Yahoo!
Google
· Brendan Fraser lays out the 12 steps to an action movie's success
· Watch This: 'The Tracey Fragments'
· DVD review: The Closer: Complete Third Season
· The perfect subject for 'Gonzo'
· Thompson portrait reveals a man shaped -- and undone -- by his times
· 'Gits' remembers the peak of Seattle punk
· 'Brick Lane' is a journey of identity and assimilation
· 'Hancock' and 'Kittredge' have strengths
· Limited movie reviews
· Seattle movie events
· Watch This: 'Drillbit Taylor'
· Parents Film Guide
more· Actors union ratifies deal with Hollywood studios
· Matthew McConaughey, girlfriend welcome baby boy
· Psychiatrist: Brinkley should weigh choice of men
· Drew Barrymore and Justin Long end relationship
· Kidman, Urban pick Sunday Rose for newborn girl
more
101 Elliott Ave. W.
Seattle, WA 98119
(206) 448-8000
Home Delivery: (206) 464-2121 or (800) 542-0820
seattlepi.com serves about 1.7 million unique visitors
and 30 million page views each month.
Send comments to newmedia@seattlepi.com
Send investigative tips to iteam@seattlepi.com
©1996-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Terms of Use/Privacy Policy
