Domino is that special kind of movie that goes for broke. Every scene is filled with the loudest, most boisterous possible film-making, screaming with life. Is it a very good movie per se? No. It is way too self-indulgent and silly. It makes the real-life Domino Harvey look like an almost impossibly improbable bad-ass, showing her in impractical, John Wayne fantasy-oriented scenes wherein she coolly punches or tells off a snobby Beverly Hills brat and other such pride-centered presentations of her. But the amount of license it takes is used to the advantage of just how outlandish a movie can possibly be. The only true events in the film are the early things we learn of Domino being the daughter of deceased actor Lawrence Harvey, who was in the original Manchurian Candidate, and the switch from supermodel to bounty hunter. Aside from that, the movie lets itself go. It's written by Richard Kelly, who wrote the famously weird Donnie Darko, and Steve Barancik, who wrote The Last Seduction, another movie about a woman who lives by her own rules and will go to great lengths to secure that lifestyle. That volatile combination of styles runs amok in this grenade of a script, which has a plot with more strands and subplots than two or three movies altogether. This script doesn't make very much sense more than half the time, but it's got more life than most movies that can actually be considered good. That's because Tony Scott, whose visual style has been rapidly developing into the most advanced form of post-modern VH1/MTV-flavored editing and cinematography for his entire career, and the two screenwriters, who had more fun than a week's worth of orgies writing the overbearingly passionate script, totally went for a record-setting amount of excess with Domino.
Just because of all of that, Domino is one of the most riveting and guiltily entertaining movies I've ever seen. It has glaring problems with it and is shamelessly exploitative, even without counting the faults I mentioned at the beginning of this review. Why? Because that rare kind of film, blazing, expressive, no-holds-barred, over-the-top with more scope than it really needs? The most engaging films are so often these kinds of movies, these movies that are in love with themselves. They do more than they need to and the filmmakers pour every bit of heart and soul into it. That's why Domino weighs on your mind afterwards and makes you forget about the outside world when you're in the theater seeing it.
