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 Needless embellishment causes ‘Domino’ to topple By CRAIG OUTHIER Get Out Tony Scott would obviously disagree, but Domino Harvey's life story didn't leave a lot of opportunity for creative embellishment. She was raised in Beverly Hills. She was the daughter of late actor Laurence Harvey (“The Manchurian Candidate”). She rejected her privileged upbringing (and a lucrative modeling career) to crack skulls and collar perps as a take-no-crap female bounty hunter. So I ask you: What's to embellish? For Scott, the fitfully talented director of “Top Gun” and “True Romance,” just about everything. With screenwriter Richard Kelly (“Donnie Darko”), the filmmaker has taken a potentially epic story of self-reinvention and turned it into a derivative, sensationalistic, malignant pile of stylishly edited garbage. It's an affront not just to cinematic reason, but to Harvey (who died last summer of a painkiller overdose) herself. Elfin ingenue Keira Knightley (“Bend It Like Beckham”) plays Domino, but her performance isn't nearly grounded enough to coax this mutant airship back to earth. The story unfolds in flashback as a bruised-and-bloodied Domino is interrogated by an FBI agent (Lucy Liu, miscast) about an armored car robbery and other deadly intrigues that could lead to a jail sentence for the one-time Ford agency model. The interrogation takes us back to Domino's days as a nunchuck-wielding teen, her disillusionment with the “90210” lifestyle and her flickery, barely remembered relationship with her famous father. Sick of it all, she hitches on with bounty hunters Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), broken souls with bodies to match. Domino's underworld odyssey is not without amusement. There's the scene where she defuses a Mexican standoff (involving real Mexicans, no less) by offering a lap dance. Or the reality TV show — hosted by “Beverly Hills, 90210” stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, the demons of her youth — that cynically tries to distill entertainment from Domino's violent exploits. (Christopher Walken plays the show's producer, in a pointless but amusing bit of scenery-chewing self-parody.) But just as “Domino” frees itself from the obligations of its “based on a true story” disclaimer, so does it become more chaotic, abusive, gratuitous and nonsensical. No notion of artistic license can justify some of the fiction Scott tries to pull off here: Peyote-tripping in the desert, Afghan terrorists and, most preposterously, a subplot involving a sick little girl explicitly manufactured to make us feel something for this hollow spectacle of cruelty and “Natural Born Killers”-style media-bashing. Along with his frenetic “texturing” of sounds and colors, Scott's sensationalist tactics leave us not with the sense that we've tasted Harvey's soul, but that we've endured something truly bitter: Really bad Oliver Stone. ‘Domino’ |
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