Land of Whimsy

Movies watched in March 2006

Land of Whimsy / Movies / Movies watched in March 2006

Friday, March 10, 2006

Domino *½

USA: Tony Scott, 2005

"My name is Domino Harvey. I am a bounty huntah."

I've just had the misfortune of enduring the two hours of non-stop MTV editing, oversaturated photography and cockfisted camerawork that is Domino. Good god, will someone please stop the ride?

In all honesty, I wanted to like this film. Tony Scott can turn out a decent movie when the mood takes him (I consider Enemy of the State one of the most all-round enjoyable thrillers of the last decade, even if it's not particularly original or demanding). I also think Keira Knightley is a better actor than most people will admit (check out the otherwise turgid The Jacket to see her best all-round performance). And hell, I'll even give Scott and crew credit for achieving exactly what they set out to accomplish. None of Domino's infuriating cocktail of garish colours, jump-cuts, freeze-frames and resampled sound bytes is accidental. These guys actually wanted to make a film this nauseating - a "punk rock fever dream", in the words of writer Richard Kelly - and that's the really scary part.

Yesterday, in my Screen Bodies class, we watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a film that I enjoyed the first couple of times I saw it but now consider to be extremely overrated. Fear and Loathing has similar aims to Domino - to create an extremely visceral experience that makes the viewer feel as if he or she is under the influence of drugs - but interestingly uses them to completely opposite effect. Fear and Loathing's problem that it is sluggishly paced, over-long and filled with padding and scenes that go nowhere. In effect, it becomes a chore to watch, and the overall feeling is something that can be best described as the nausea of waiting for a bad trip to end (at least I'm guessing that's what it is - I don't use the horse). Domino, meanwhile, is like the heady rush films such as Requiem for a Dream have tried to capture, only there's no euphoria, just the sickening sensation that you're on a ride going too fast that you wish would stop.

Frankly, I'd expected better not just from Scott (whose career, while patchy, has at least delivered a handful of fun thrillers and action movies) but also from Kelly, the writer-director of Donnie Darko and the man who penned Domino's feeble excuse for a script. The screenplay isn't just bad, it's cack-handed in the extreme, and if you ask me Kelly has pretty much eviscerated any of the kudos he was riding on thanks to Donnie Darko.

The final verdict? Save your money for real drugs.

IMDB reference