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What a waste. Domino Harvey’s life — tough, true and tragic — was the stuff big-screen biographers dream of. Harvey, the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate), ditched her Beverly Hills-minted fortune for a seedy gig as a bounty hunter and died last year, not even 40 years old, of a drug overdose. What more do you need?
That’s a question director Tony Scott (Man on Fire) and writer Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) should have asked themselves before they mounted this staggering, excessive mess. To say Scott — thrashing us with hyperbolic camerawork until it qualifies as audience abuse — botches the job is an understatement.
He renders Domino, which he lovingly laboured on for years, unwatchable. Kelly’s frazzled, frenetic script is so convoluted at one point Scott throws up a digital scorecard on screen so viewers might be able to follow along. Like they’ll want to.
The only words they’ll be pining to see at this point, two-thirds into Scott’s over-adrenalized opus, are The End. Believe me, it can’t come fast enough.
Drowned in the dementia is both Harvey’s life — there is so much fiction in Domino that the facts are rendered unrecognizable — and a cast of A-listers who should have known better.
Chief among them is star Keira Knightley, a newly-minted Oscar nominee for her turn in Pride and Prejudice and retainer of the “World’s Sexiest Beanpole” crown — bestowed on her by Internet nerds — thanks to her nude Vanity Fair cover.
Not that she’s alone in the misery. Suffering alongside her are Mickey Rourke as Domino’s bounty-hunting Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ed Mosbey; Christopher Walken as the architect of a reality-TV show Domino ends up starring in (a creation of Kelly’s that further divorces the story from reality); and Jacqueline Bisset as Domino’s socialite mother, who tried to tame Domino’s inner demons at an early age by putting her in boarding school.
Saddled with a screenplay that never strays to the deep end of the pool, Knightley’s performance runs the gamut from A to B.
But she probably had other things on her mind.
As the movie — which kicks off with an FBI shrink played by Lucy Liu interrogating Domino — disintegrates before our eyes, it’s all Knightley can do to cling for dear life as Scott’s rocket implodes on the launchpad.
At least viewers can switch it off.
EXTRAS: Commentary from Scott and Kelly, deleted scenes and a featurette on Harvey’s life that hints at what this film might have been.