Film Reviews

Domino

• Rating:
• Director: Tony Scott
• Starring: Keira Knightley
• Details: UK, 127mins, 16s.

Based on the true story of Domino Harvey (Knightley), daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, who turned her back on her career as a Ford model to become a bounty hunter, Domino takes some liberties with the true-life story of this little tough nut. Scott makes no bones of straying from a script to make, in his mind, better cinema (cf: Tarantino's True Romance) and you have to wonder what the original script by Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly was like. The movie stumbles around a plot involving stolen money, the mafia, the FBI, some fringe criminals and ends in a shoot-out in the Stratosphere - the tallest hotel in Las Vegas. Scott bathes the screen in a green hue for reasons known only to himself and seems to concentrate on hyper-stylizing the action and upping the adrenaline while leaving character development reclining in a Lazyboy. Narration is a writer's trick to get the audience onside with the main character but as Knightley recounts the details from pretty-girl lost to outright tough gal, any sympathy to her plight is lost in Scott's gung-ho violent vision. How the fact that Domino Harvey died of an overdose of painkillers at the age of thirty-five was lost on the filmmakers is a complete mystery.

Review by Gavin Burke