Domino (2005)

Tony Scott's Domino is lacquered with such gobs of stylistic excess, it would make McG blush. But this movie has little in common with McG's light-hearted Charlie's Angels movies, beyond briefly alluding to them and featuring Lucy Liu. Instead, it's a violent, depraved collage of iconographic porn, fetishizing everything from cigarette smoking to pencil sharpening, and shot with a stroke-inducing reliance on swish pans and flashing lights. It's not just style over substance; style murders substance, using those double-barreled machine guns Keira Knightley wields in the ads. Granted, the life of model-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey is pretty ostentatious source material, but Scott turns Richard Kelly's showy script into one giant middle finger at good taste. Scott was clearly hoping for a multi-character, pop-influenced crime thriller like his own True Romance, and the bones of the story do sometimes work in that way. And in a postmodern crossover with real life, Beverly Hills 90210 stars Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering appear as themselves, hosting a reality show centered on Domino's team. But any marginally interesting ideas are drowned by superfluous technique, including but not limited to: looping and tweaking of spoken lines, choice bits of dialogue typed out on screen for emphasis, and so much manipulating of film stock, it's like a test drive of a graphics program. Such glossy bombast can't help but culminate in a ridiculous Mexican standoff at the top of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas. If only hacks were involved in the making of Domino, it would be one thing, but the good reputations of Scott and Kelly duped numerous appealing actors into participating. Domino marked the beginning of a really bad year for Kelly, the golden boy behind Donnie Darko, whose sophomore directing effort (Southland Tales) was subsequently laughed out of Cannes. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide