Domino

I had the benefit of extensive notes in trying to follow the rapid pace and incongruous nature of this film, but as most moviegoers aren’t in the habit of carefully enumerating plot points, I would suggest paying extremely close attention to every little detail in order to understand what the hell is going on.

It’s nice that director Tony Scott prefaces Domino by admitting that it is only sort of based on a true story, meaning that all he really wanted to do was take a real-life female bounty hunter and place her in a largely fictionalized adventure story. My main complaint with Domino, however, is that while I don’t mind watching a highly fabricated tale of the exploits of a female bounty hunter, I think a more chronological version of the story would have been a little easier to watch. Unfortunately, Scott sacrifices part of his story by telling it in no particular order and using spastic and jittery camera angles in almost every single scene.

Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley) spends her teenage years rebelling against the life of luxury in which she feels trapped. Finding the opulent environment around her to be rather dull and pretentious, she attends a bounty-hunting seminar hosted by Ed Mosbey (Mickey Rourke), the most legendary bounty hunter in the world, in the hopes of injecting some excitement into her life. Once Ed and his partner, Choco (Edgar Ramirez) witness Domino’s unique intensity and mettle, they welcome her aboard the team and teach her the fundamentals of bounty hunting. After several years of successful captures, Ed’s boss, Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo), sets them on the trail of armored car thieves who have just stolen $10 million from a Las Vegas kingpin, charging the mob a $300,000 finder’s fee for their hunting services. This is when things get complicated, however, as Domino realizes that they will be delivering the robbers to the mob instead of the police as is normal procedure. Claremont’s girlfriend, Lateesha (Mo’Nique), works at the DMV and appears to be involved with the robbery scheme somehow, having provided fake ID’s to the alleged robbers days before the theft. It then quickly becomes evident to Domino that Claremont has gotten her and her team into a dangerous situation, when the mafia begins to suspect that Claremont himself arranged the robbery in order to collect the $300,000 finder’s fee.

It should be apparent by now that while the plot is obviously quite detailed, it’s not necessarily all that complicated. However, Scott’s insistence upon making it so by having no apparent order in revealing important details did cause a bit of frustration on my part. It is somewhat irritating when a director presents the audience with a set of events and then reveals 20 minutes later that, oh yeah, it actually happened a completely different way than the earlier depiction. When this happens multiple times in the film, Scott finally resorts to literally showing the audience a diagram in order to clarify matters. Unfortunately, even his diagrams made little sense.

Despite this, I still enjoyed the movie. Domino Harvey was an exceptionally easy character for whom to root, and I thought her action scenes, while frenetic and visually hard to follow, were still quite exciting to watch. Anyone who doesn’t mind fast-paced stories and “artistic” shaky cameras will surely not have any complaints with Domino, because the story really is a fascinating, if not substantially fictional, look at a tough little rich girl in a violent underworld. Personally, I enjoyed the film, but many might prefer to wait for DVD.