DOMINO - like a ferret on crystal meth

DOMINO is a failure of a movie. Shot and edited like a ferret on crystal myth, this movie is the most likely to cause motion sickness since RAG TALE. With so many freeze-frames, jump cuts, colour-saturated action sequences, it takes a real effort to actually concentrate on what is actually going on. Perhaps this is the intention of the director, because the plot is poor. Do not be fooled by the fact that the central concept is fascinating or that the screenplay was penned by Richard Kelley, the wuenderkind who wrote and directed DONNIE DARKO. Donnie Darko was a great flick but let's tell it like it is: Kelly screwed up a perfectly fascinating tale. For DOMINO is a very loose biopic of a woman called Domino Harvey. The daughter of a famous actor and a supermodel, Domino reacted against the stuffy British establishment and the Beverly Hills crowd. She got thrown out of a bunch of boarding schools and eventually became a bounty hunter in South L.A. Now, that's a story, and Tony Scott, director of TOP GUN, TRUE ROMANCE and SPY GAME, thought so too.

Here's the glitch. Kelly or Scott or whoever had the brainwave of overlaying Domino's story with a heist movie. Worse, a heist plot that is difficult to believe, so reliant is it on absurd coincidences. Then, just to add to the general chaos obscuring the central story, they added a whole bunch of fascinating but totally out-of-place discourse on pop-culture. There are lots of fun critiques of reality TV, for instance, but the satire is blunt and moves away from the point.

All of which makes DOMINO a rather uninvolving and annoying viewing experience. Who knew? A Christopher Walken film I would happily not see again.

DOMINO is on release in the US and UK. It goes on release in France on November 23rd 2005 and in Austria and Germany on December 29th.