Domino Movie Review: An Acid Trip with Domino

The life experiences of Domino Harvey taught her not to invest too much emotion on any certain thing. But she couldn't get away with it... Just like with director Tony Scott... looks like he invested too much emotion in merely creating a visual treatment for the movie, making it too loud and exaggerated.

Oozing with tomboy spunkiness, Keira Knightley plays the character of the late Domino Harvey, the daughter of British actor Laurence Harvey. She turned away opportunities for a glamorous career in the limelight to become a bounty hunter. Domino revolves around the story of this model-turned-fighter and her group's most recent raid involving $10 million stolen money. The movie is overloaded with cutting-edge visuals and stylistic intentions: hand-cranked cameras, jittery zooms, epileptic editing. And they all have their good and bad points.

Domino is filled with series of disjointed snapshot moments that tend to show off a more altered state of dealing with the story and the audience's emotions. FBI agent Taryn Miles (Lucy Liu) interviews Domino about her case and other cases to work on involving the stolen $10 million. And from this interview, various flashbacks are shown in snapshots: the recounting of a cute little girl brought up in the upper class society and her moments with her father just before he died; her boring life as a model; her boarding school life; her personal training to become a bounty hunter; her bounty hunter days; her group filming a reality show along with two Beverly Hills 90210 actors; and plotpoints overfilled with people and things getting shot and smashed up and blown up during bounty hunter-criminal encounters. And in between, the memories are cut to go back to Domino and the FBI agent inside a small room in low-key lighting. That's the story.

Whether intentionally or not, it seems like the whole movie being an interview between Domino and the agent is a near escape to put in the experimental but cluttered visuals intended for the movie.

There is too much focus on making visual statements than telling a good story. A better screenplay could have supported the visual content more effectively in order to make the movie much more worthwhile.

Domino's tough guy cohorts Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez) give her the chance to fulfill the fun she seeks for: becoming a bounty hunter. Ed shines as her bounty hunter mentor and surrogate father. Choco becomes, more than just a teammate - a repressed love of her life. But one thing that has not been clear enough is the vague and sudden entrance of a certain Wanderer (Tom Waits) in one scene as he does his mysterious preacher-like and prophetic monologue about Domino, her group and the society. He suddenly shows up out of the blue to answer all of Domino's questions when she doesn't know what to do. It's like... it has been injected in the script just to put in some good space for cinematic tension and drama. Its weakness hides within its experimental treatment that you tend to mostly see in independent, experimental and art-house films (but not as excessive as these film's visuals).

Some of Domino's repetitive lines about life, death and destiny in the movie have been striking and effective: "Heads you win, tails you die... My destiny is life..." Here, there is a certain mood and feel in a considerably favorable taste for cinematic drama.

Watching this film is like an acid trip towards jittery shots, playful visuals, some dark and some warm and saturated colors, low-key lighting, choppy edits and a very bad sound track and musical score in an over-plotted story. The series of supposedly powerful visuals are tied together into a cluttered film of snapshots.

Domino gives some good statements. It could have been a good movie, if not for it becoming overdosed with hyper-stylized visual treatment. It went a bit overboard, just like with the real-life Domino Harvey who lost her life because of drug overdose.