Domino
We'll have to wait for the November release of ''Pride & Prejudice" to see Keira Knightley as a vision of grace. In the meantime, here she is as a foul-mouthed bounty hunter in Tony Scott's ''Domino." She swings nunchucks, bloodies noses, blackens eyes, totes a gun, and performs a lap dance. Knightley is at the start of her career, and perhaps someday she'll look back on Scott's latest scuzzy opus with fond memories of how she spent her paycheck, since her integrity as a performer is utterly beside the point here.
We know what the movie expects from her during the opening titles sequence, when the alphabetized dominoes with the cast's names and photos tumble forward. Hers is just a gawking shot of her cleavage. Sigh.
Domino Harvey was the real-life English daughter of Laurence Harvey, the late star of the original ''Manchurian Candidate" and an absentee father. In the movie, her frosty, gold-digging mother (Jacqueline Bisset) moves Domino to Los Angeles, where the girl proves to be an expert saboteur. Having ruined runway shows during her stint as a fashion model and beaten up sorority sisters in her brief time as a pledge, she prefers grit to beauty, and attends a bounty-hunting seminar. There she meets Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez) -- actually, she stops them from stealing the registrants' fees, then befriends them.
Steve Barancik, who wrote ''The Last Seduction," and Richard Kelly, the writer and director of ''Donnie Darko," are credited with the ''Domino" screenplay, but since so much of what's wrong with the movie appears to have happened in the cutting room (it's edited for junkies), who knows what they intended? The film is sliced and diced every which way. It's told as a collection of flashbacks that Domino sets in motion during one of those after-the-fact police interrogation sequences. Her inquisitor, played by Lucy Liu, wants to know about the elaborate heist whose reach extends to Domino, mobsters, the feds, and Dabney Coleman.
With a different screenplay and a much different director, this movie could been a gonzo frolic, like ''Natural Born Killers" only less insane. But Scott has never had Oliver Stone's critical eye or his psychotic humor. His most unforgivable trait as a director is not that he makes degrading, cartoonishly macho pictures. It's that he's serious about them. Quentin Tarantino has mastered the sort of movie Scott is attempting here: a kitschy circus.
Amid the bounty-hunter raids and the heist plot, there appears to be a whiff of satire in ''Domino" involving a reality television show that trails Domino, Ed, and Choco. It's produced by a nebbish, played by Christopher Walken, and hosted by two former stars of ''Beverly Hills 90210," as themselves. It's toothless. ''Domino" also pays a condescending visit to ''The Jerry Springer Show," where the comedian Mo'Nique gives an uproarious presentation on mixed-race people.
Tarantino could get away with this: He likes us, and he likes movies. Scott is a cynic with bad taste in style. At times, the dialogue leaps out of characters' mouths and literally appears on the screen. And the movie has a distressed, oversaturated look, as if Scott were making designer jeans instead of a film.
No one is looking to him for decorum. But his pornographic lust for bloodletting, gunplay, and out-of-control camerawork far exceeds his abilities to tell a story. He's been churning out barrel-chested productions for decades, but there used to be something to grasp beneath the greasy surfaces of his movies. They were entertainments about men in tough situations: ''Top Gun," ''Beverly Hills Cop II," ''Days of Thunder," ''The Last Boy Scout," ''True Romance," ''Crimson Tide," ''The Fan," and ''Enemy of the State." But his last film, ''Man on Fire," with Denzel Washington on a rampage, crossed a line into senseless brutality, which continues with this new overproduced outing.
''Domino" is about a woman whom Scott wants to act like a man, but without sacrificing the arousing qualities one might desire in a pretty young lady. The movie has no interest in her psychologically. It's worth noting that the actual Domino Harvey, who died in June of a drug overdose, was an androgynous creature, not a beautiful chick with a punky haircut.
Alas, the only character for us to relate to in ''Domino" is the lucky goldfish that is flushed down a toilet. Sadly, we don't go with it. We're left floating around the bowl for another hour.
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