AmateurMovieReviews.com

The 2005 Tony Scott film Domino is said to be based in part on a true story. It is about a real-life female bounty hunter named Domino Harvey who used to be a model before turning to the more dangerous trade of tracking down criminals. Keira Knightley stars in the title role, with supporting performances from Mickey Rourke, Delroy Lindo, Edgar Ramirez, Lucy Liu, and even former Beverly Hills, 90210 teen idols Ian Ziering and Brian Austen Green (playing themselves).

The plot of Domino is a bit confusing at first because the story is not told in chronological order. In addition, some scenes are told again from a different vantage point or redone entirely in order to show what really happened (when a character mistakenly speculates about what went down the first time). Yes, eventually the viewer gets a pretty clear picture of what the plot was about, but that's only after seeing the entire thing.

The movie starts with Domino Harvey already in FBI custody, so we know the events will be flashbacks. This serves to remove some of the suspense from a few key scenes because we know Domino is still alive. As she says, "This ain't Sunset Blvd." so we know that screenwriter Richard Kelly is not going to employ the dead narrator technique used in that classic.

Domino is talking to an FBI psychologist named Ms. Miles (Liu) who is trying to extract information about $10 million in stolen money and about an explosion that took off the top of a famous Las Vegas hotel. Domino is very willing to talk, and starts her narrative from the beginning. And by from the beginning, I mean from her childhood.

So we get the first in a series of flashbacks. This one shows a few of the events that have helped shape Domino into the person that she eventually became. The flashbacks continue on to show how Domino first hooked up with her bounty hunting boss Ed Mosbey (Rourke) and his partner Choco (Ramirez) by paying $99 for a scam seminar run by those two and bail bondsman Claremont Williams (Lindo). Domino accosts Mosbey and Choco as they are trying to hightail it out of the seminar with the customers' money and demands that they take her on as a member of the team. Mosbey likes Domino's toughness and her looks, so he agrees.

Domino proves to be very good at the bounty hunting game, and the team starts to enjoy considerable success. Domino is even named Bounty Hunter of the Year, which brings about a whole subplot involving Ziering, Green, and a reality TV show. Things seem to be going well until Claremont Williams sets the gang up on a mission that involves the mafia. The details of that mission and the fallout from Williams's miscalculation become the focus of the rest of the movie.

Domino was not successful at the box office. It barely grossed $10 million in its three-month U.S. theater run, which is a figure that even an average film can attain in a couple of weeks. I guess some people were turned off by the way the film was edited: there were lots of quick cuts and weird camera angles used throughout, as Tony Scott clearly took some chances in an effort to give the movie a different feel. I found that I didn't mind the camera angles so much as I did the choice of Keira Knightley as Domino.

I thought Knightley was not right for the role at all. She seemed far too small and delicate to play a bounty hunter. I know that was supposed to be the point, and one of the other characters even calls her "delicate" very early on in the film -- perhaps in anticipation of the audience's reaction. I don't know what the real Domino Harvey looked like, but I thought the filmmakers should have taken some liberties when casting the role and should have given the lead to someone who would have been more convincing as a bounty hunter. Ordinarily, I really like Knightley, but she didn't work in this role at all.

Overall, I didn't think Domino was a good movie. There are certainly some funny moments and interesting scenes, but the film as a whole lacked cohesion. In the end, it just seemed like a bunch of scenes thrown together. I wouldn't bother with this one if I were you.