Poochified My World of Flops Case File #170/Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #148 Domino (2005) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

Sometimes separate Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 choices overlap nicely. This week, for example, I will be exploring the cinema of Richard Kelly because different patrons independently chose his 2004 mind-melter The Southland Tales and 2005’s Domino, which Kelly scripted for Tony Scott.

I was excited for Domino during its theatrical release. I went in wondering how a Richard Kelly-written, Tony Scott-directed smart-ass, ferociously post-modern fantasia on the life of real-life badass/model-turned bounty hunter Domino Harvey (the daughter of The Manchurian Candidate star Laurence) starring Keira Knightley and (deep breath) Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo, Mo’Nique, Dabney Coleman, Lucy Liu, Macy Gray, Jaqueline Bisset, Christopher Walken, Mena Suvari and Brian Austin Green, Ian Ziering and Jerry Springer as themselves could be anything other than insane and amazing.

Two hours and seven minutes later I had my answer. It turns out that getting punched in the face with awesomeness, attitude and edge for a little over two hours is NOT a pleasurable experience. In fact, it’s the OPPOSITE of a pleasant experience! It is, in fact, a deeply unpleasant experience.

Domino has so many crazy, random, awesome celebrities in random roles that you become spoiled and wonder why every role wasn’t filled by someone like Bobby McFerrin, Shaq, Kenny G., Fabio or Morganna the Kissing Bandit.

Somewhere between easily ignored real life and irresistible show-business make-believe, a woman who died of a Fentanyl overdoses shortly before the film’s release got Poochified 250 percent and became a glib, nihilistic fantasy, a punk rock, bad-ass, gun-toting, skin tight leather-clad rock star of the bounty hunter world so jaded that the only thing that doesn’t bore her to tears is facing down violent death on a daily basis.

It’s not enough that our anti-hero’s striking good looks got her work as a model before she found her true calling as a skip tracer: no, she has to be the GG Allin of the runway, a punch-throwing, brawl-instigating hellcat who stops just short of hurling her own feces at fashion show crowds to REALLY broadcast just how much she doesn’t give a fuck.

Domino’s primary, if not exclusive, forms of pleasure come from punching people in the face so hard that she breaks their noses and/or threatening terrified strangers with guns. That limits her career options to pretty much just bounty hunting, where that’s pretty much the gig: show up unexpectedly, wave a gun around and deliver a swift punch to the kisser if they don’t play ball.

Domino opens near the very end of the story, with Domino being interviewed by criminal psychologist Taryn Mills (Lucy Liu) about her role in a ten million dollar heist. The film then unfolds in flashback as Domino relays how she rebelled against her pampered life as the impossibly gorgeous progeny of movie star Laurence Harvey and a glamorous model by sabotaging her career as a model with her pugilistic style, attaining a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-level of mastery over nunchucks, knives, stars and hand-to-hand combat and getting a job as a hotshot bounty hunter working for wily Claremont Williams III (Delroy Lindo) alongside fellow badasses/bounty hunters Ed Moseby (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Édgar Ramírez), a sexy, dangerous maverick whose personality primarily consists of aggressively, even confrontationally speaking Spanish to women he knows do not speak it.

With her tight, low-ride leather pants and midriff-baring tops, Domino emerges as both a vague, not terribly convincing figure of female empowerment and a total sex object the camera can’t stop ogling. Scott gives Knightley the same treatment Michael Bay gave Megan Fox in the Transformers; shooting her from the perspective of a horny old man looking to get his rocks off.

Domino, Choco and Ed are SO sexy and charismatic and badass and amazing and impressive that small screen stardom soon comes calling in the form of an offer for the trio to star in their own Dog the Bounty Hunter-style reality show hosted by the aforementioned Green and Ziering, only better because they’re so scorchingly attractive and cool.

Before introducing our trio of badasses to her reality television producer boss Mark Heiss (Christopher Walken), his assistant Kimmie (Mena Suvari) warns Domino, Choco and Ed that he has “the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth.”

That means he’ll be the perfect audience for Domino, which is so ridiculously overwrought that even a goldfish that figures prominently in it overacts wildly, thrashing about with hammy nervous intensity like he’s the goddamn Jared Leto of the fishbowl set. I know it’s just more of Scott’s sped-up editing but the True Romance director’s style is so overheated that it even affects creatures way down the food chain from us. The goldfish can’t just be a goldfish and swim around in his little goldfish bowl. No, this has to be a goldfish with ATTITUDE. This is a goldfish that lives ON THE EDGE. This goldfish FUCKS. This is not your daddy’s goldfish. This goldfish is EXTREME. It’d rather swim around in Red Bull mixed with vodka than water.

Scott bombards audiences with stimuli and spectacle. He wants to pummel us into enjoyment, to shove fun so far down our throats that we can’t breathe, let alone kick back and enjoy ourselves.

Add Domino to Gigli and The Country Bears as a world class stinker Walken briefly redeems with his oddball presence. Christopher Walken fretting, “I’m having font issues!” will never not be funny. He’s hilarious as the kind of consummate schmoozer and phony who answers Domino’s mother’s concerns about her daughter’s portrayal in the media with a wonderfully smarmy, “This is REALITY television! What you see IS what you get!” as if it’s somehow transparently obvious that of COURSE a reality show is going to be ethical and honest.

Domino’s best moments find Kelly scribbling happily in the margins, using a major studio budget and a once in a lifetime cast to let his imagination take him into some exquisitely goofy places, like a batshit crazy showcase for Mo’Nique as the self-proclaimed “world’s youngest grandmother” where she goes on The Jerry Springer Show and delivers a bonkers TED Talk of sorts about all of the different ethnic combinations she has catalogued and named, including, but not limited to, “Blackasian”, “Chinegro”, “Japegro”, “Japanic” and many others.

It’s funny because Mo’Nique is effortlessly funny but also because it’s so incredibly random. When it lets itself be goofy in an unmistakably Southland Tales fashion, Domino can be tremendous fun, like when Mo’Nique’s character frets that she did not succeed in her plan to use her Jerry Springer Show appearance to “talk about the health care crisis in America” and instead ended up getting into a fistfight with a random audience member.

In another gloriously insane standalone gag, a man at a sexaholic anonymous meeting pulls out a boombox and plays 2 Live Crew’s ribald anthem “Me So Horny” before solemnly asserting, “If 2 Live Crew has taught us anything, it’s that horniness in today’s society is out of control.”

This, needless to say, has NOTHING to do with the rest of the film. Kelly just thought it would be funny if a dude in a support group for sex addicts played that particular song and uttered those words with deeply misplaced seriousness. He was right but these weird bits of random comedy stand out in part because they provide a welcome respite from everything in the film that does not work.

This is what happens when Lucy Liu’s agent angrily inquires at the last minute why his client is not on the DVD cover.

Domino would be better off if it was a goofy movie with elements of badassery (not unlike the film A Goofy Movie) rather than a wannabe badass movie that’s sometimes goofy. As the director of The Hunger, Scott should know a little something about cool but he does not understand that coolness must be organic and effortless or it’s not authentic.

Knightley has the looks, charisma and physical presence to play someone like Domino but the film doesn’t give her a character to play, only an endless series of poses and sneers. It’s so enamored with the idea of Domino as the ultimate badass that it completely loses sight of its ostensible subject as a human being.

When Domino is contemplating reality show stardom her mother warns her sagely, “You will be exploited. Your story will not be told truthfully. Your life will not be the same.” To give Domino, which is nothing if not self-aware, sometimes painfully so, credit, it seems to understand that this criticism could be levied at the film as well.

In transforming a crazy true life story into a bonkers pop art cartoon Domino ended up doing its subject a profound disservice even if its biggest weakness might just be that it’s not enough of a pop art cartoon and entirely too much of a self-satisfied, hyper-macho action fantasy.

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco

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