PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 10/14/05)

"This is a true story. Sort of." So begins Domino, which ranks alongside Confessions of a Dangerous Mind as one of the least trustworthy biopics of all time. Yes, The Manchurian Candidate star Laurence Harvey had a daughter named Domino, and yes she became a bounty hunter, but that's basically where the truth ends and the Hollywood hokum begins.

Now, don't get me wrong. As far as I'm concerned, Hollywood's free to take whatever liberties it likes with the truth, but it's just downright negligent if the results are less interesting than the events that inspired them. Here, we have a case in which Tinseltown identified a real person they thought would make a compelling action hero and invented a parallel universe for her to kick some ass.

Domino Harvey's a great character, a spoiled little rich girl so bored with her sheltered Beverly Hills lifestyle that she swung as far as possible in the opposite direction. In Tony Scott's hands, she's a short-fuse firecracker, a tomboy tease who added sex appeal and women's intuition to the toolbox of her tough-guy partners (a hothead who speaks only Spanish, an Afghan explosives expert and Mickey Rourke). But it's hard to appreciate a character when Scott's fractured, split-second editing and oversaturated shooting style keeps getting in the way.

Domino is an exhausting, indecipherable mess. Most of the time, the movie seems to be chasing its tail at breakneck speed, and yet Scott makes time for such diversions as a 10-minute Jerry Springer sketch with Mo'Nique. The longest shot in the movie lasts maybe five seconds as Tom Waits drives off into the sunset, but the average shot passes faster than a hummingbird can beat its wings. It says something that the sequence in which the characters start tripping on mescaline feels no different from the rest of the movie.

When Domino-as-narrator says, "You're probably wondering how a girl like me ended up here, at the ass-end of the Nevada desert in a blood-spattered Winnebago with a one-armed man," I shook my head and thought, "Not really." Scott's taken such a gonzo approach with his material that it wouldn't have surprised me if Domino had ended up chasing Klingons through space. The fact that it all leads to a Mexican standoff atop an exploding casino merely suggests that Scott's trying to top the stunts he's pulled in earlier movies. Watching Domino (and Man on Fire before it), I'm glad Scott tackled Quentin Tarantino's True Romance script a dozen years ago, before his attention-deficit antics overtook his directorial style.

Such criticisms aside, I'm reluctant to dismiss the whole thing outright. It wouldn't be hard to direct an exciting movie with Domino as its subject, so why did Tony Scott decide to make this one? I suspect it had something to do with the reality-show subplot, in which Christopher Walken plays the lunatic producer of a fly-on-the-wall show called Bounty Squad. If TV can distort the facts through editing, why can't movies do the same thing? I suspect Scott sees Domino as the ultimate provocation, his way of grabbing Hollywood by the throat and shouting, "You want reality??! I'll give you REALITY!!!" Sort of. — Peter Debruge