Review of Domino (1982) by Nathan M — 03 Nov 2012

An entertainingly messy spasm of a movie, Domino is a stylish later work of Tony Scott with Keira Knightley playing against type as a decidedly non-costume drama character. The film shreds in its first third with Knightley blitzkrieging the screen with her delectable British accent.

However, once the focus on her atrophies at around the halfway point, the film gets slack and never really recovers. The limited scope of the film and the restrictive narrated delivery (by Knightley) of the story prevents it from being as fun as it could have been.

Mickey Rourke is good as Knightley's associate bounty hunter and Christopher Walken is funny in his small role as a television producer. Visually, the film is a fast cutting, severely layered, and frenetic overload that doesn't ever let the viewer enjoy the exotic collage that Scott assembles for us.

It has a similar feel to Natural Born Killers, but without the ecstatic stylistic clarity of that Oliver Stone fantasy. The fact that it's a heist film greenlit in the wake of Ocean's Eleven with somewhat of an ensemble tendency, as well as the frenetic style prevents it from being very compelling as an action vehicle for the typically typecast Keira Knightley.

Despite all that, it's not a bad film, just one that could have used a better screenplay and some stylistic restraint on the part of Tony Scott. (2 November 2012).