Rating of
2.5/4
Blood, guns, and Brian Austin Green
Snake Sugarbaker - wrote on 12/11/09
The most recent Tony Scott movie I saw was True Romance (now over 10 years old), so I can't justifiably respond to a question like, "How was Domino?" with an "Oh, it's just another Tony Scott movie." Perhaps a sufficient answer is, "Oh, it's kinda like True Romance." Like Romance, Domino is violent, sometimes quirky, star-studded, and has one of those scenes where bloodstained $100 bills whirlybird above freshly bullet-ridden Mafiosi.
Domino (Keira Knightley) is your garden-variety wild child in Beverly Hills—until she teams up with underrated bounty hunters Ed (the nasty-ass Mickey Rourke) and Choco (the hot-as-**** Edgar Ramirez) to hunt bounty using gats and nunchucks. Injecting the men with a little "woman's touch," Domino is sometimes cunning, always fearless, and is usually wearing hip huggers and a tank top. She'd make a perfect reality star, right? So... that's just what happens; a wack studio exec (Christopher Walken) commandeers a film crew to tail the trio in their newly appointed RV. Naturally, during their first filming, things go all fugazi and folks start losing limbs.
This may seem like a plot twist that derails an already trite story. In fact, it's an inspired diversion that keeps Domino's script (which is based on the recently deceased Domino Harvey's real life as a bounty hunter) fluttering above most other action films. And it gets better—Walken's character awe-inspiringly hires 90210's Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering—who play themselves—as hosts of the Bounty Squad reality show.
So what if I would have certainly done things differently with Domino? (I wouldn't have cast Mickey Rourke, and I would also edit all the annoying sentimentality out of the picture.) While I can't really file it under "good," Domino is certainly enjoyable.