Domino (2006, DVD)

"This film is based on a true story."
"Sort of."
--Opening Insert, Domino

The real-life story of Domino Harvey would make a good movie. Someday, if we're lucky, somebody will shoot it. Till then, we're stuck with the Tony Scott version, which is about as accurate as an acid-flashback life of Lincoln.

At the very least, this would have made a good book - which is probably why Harvey should have written it. At least she could have dictated it to a writer - the way Malcolm X did when he had Alex Haley write up the story of his life. If Harvey had done that, we'd have learned more about the real Domino Harvey. As it is, somewhere between half and two-thirds of this film is material Scott invented, or had its screenwriter, Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) come up with to "punch up" a life that was hardly ordinary to begin with.

To get a feel for just how far off the reservation Tony Scott takes us, consider the following:

The real Domino Harvey was the daughter of Laurence Harvey, star of the Oscar-winning cold-war thriller, The Manchurian Candidate. Her mother, Paulene Stone, was a supermodel who later married Peter Morton, founder of the Hard Rock Cafe. Word has it, the name "Domino" was taken from a "Bond girl" in Thunderball, "Domino" Darval.

Legend has it Domino tried to follow her mother's footsteps but gave up a modeling career for the rough-and-tumble life of a bounty hunter. In fact, there's no evidence that Harvey ever worked as a model. She did, however, use her inheritance (her father died, at age 45, of stomach cancer) to reinvent herself repeatedly. At one point, she was a London nightclub owner. At another, she was a ranch hand. She even volunteered as a firefighter in San Diego, though she was rejected by the L.A. Fire Department. She was also a troubled soul who spent much of her life in and out of drug rehab. At the time of her death, Domino Harvey was awaiting trial on federal drug trafficking charges. On June 27th of this year, she was found dead in her bathroom, after overdosing on fentanyl. In death, she may have achieved the notoriety she sought in life - as if being a 5'9" female bounty hunter weren't legendary enough.

To tell such a story, and to tell it right, would require paintaking research - and good instincts for sculpting "historical fact" into something watchable as a movie. After hearing about Domino from his business manager, Tony Scott interviewed Harvey and secured her agreement to have her life story turned into a feature film. In interviews, Scott speaks of the 12-year-oddyssey he took to get "Domino" up on screen. Somewhere, however, Scott decided to do more than just simplify and dramatize the storyline. Scott decided to reinvent it - and on a grand scale.

When the film opens, Domino has been taken into custody and is being interrogated by FBI agent, Taryn Miles (Lucy Liu). In voice-over narration that never really stops, Domino tells us her every thought, including her philosophy about life - that it's all a flip of the coin. "Heads you win, tales you lose" - or as Domino puts it, "Heads you live, tales you die." The whole encounter relates to a crime so complicated and octupus-like you'd think it actually happened. It didn't. Though Harvey was no stranger to drug charges, the central plot of this film revolves around an armored-car hijacking that never happened. The need to explain the case presents the opportunity to go back through Harvey's life, hitting the high points as we go.

Almost all of Harvey's life ends up on the cutting-room floor as Scott bets the farm on this fictitious hijacking, which looks like something stolen from the uber-bomb Knockaround Guys. Then, for reasons that may never be known, Scott adds a fictitious reality show - something between COPS and Jerry Springer. TV Producer Mark Heiss (Christopher Walken) and his partner/assistant, Kimmie (Mena Suvari) want to handle Domino and her partners for a TV show that would follow the trio as they kick down doors and take down the bad guys. At least here, Scott and Kelly are stealing plot points from 1976's Network, though the subplot plays like a close cousin of EdTV. In the process, Scott manages to turn someone as dead-sexy as Mena Suvari into Tina Fey while proving that no bomb has been fully detonated without a Christopher Walken cameo (See Gigli). The only explanation for this fictional detour through familiar "TV satire" is the one that explains Cameron Crowe's attachment to that steaming pile of guano called Elizabethtown: Everybody thinks their own story is damned-near fascinating stuff. In this case, I'd bet serious cash on the likelihood that Scott has injected a lot of himself into the character of TV Producer, Mark Heiss - who goes through the film spouting lines like, "We gotta sign her," "Wow," "Let's get clearances." This may all be a highly symbolic fable to stand in for objections - raised by Domino's mother, Paulene Stone, and for what Scott may have felt like - a carnie exploiting some kind of circus freak.

The best parts of this film involve Domino at work with her partners, the legendary bounty hunter, Ed Mosbey (Mickey Rourke) - a fictionalized version of Harvey's real mentor, Ed Martinez - and his petulant sidekick, Choco (Edgar Ramirez). At least here, there's some psychological truth, as the two "old pros" go from not being able to scrape Harvey off their boots to finding themselves in something like a love triangle with this 5'9" ball of energy who used her fortune to - among other things - buy "good guns." Unfortunately, most of the character development has to be run through this fictionalized carjacking plot - which Scott opted for over more accurate storylines, referring to the other scripts as "boring." But how boring can it get to write a script based on the real-life workings of a Hollywood princess who reinvents herself as a bounty hunter?

And that leads me to the direction, which bursts with all the energy of a music video/phone commercial - with a blur of jiggling camera, flood of images and overcooked film processing. In terms of visuals, this is stuff we've all seen before - for more than a decade, in fact - though it feels like Tony Scott is going for a record in terms of how long he can go with the herky-jerky, acid-flashback style. It reminds me of how some directors have stupidly had p@ssing contests over who could run the longest continuous tracking shot. If nothing else, it's a reminder that perhaps too many of Hollywood's directors are men. While Penny Marshall is not my idea of a solution to the problem, maybe these "boys and their toys" could - once in a while - quit using their million-dollar budgets to drop their pants and whip out the rulers. Just once in a while, it might be nice to shoot a film with the audience in mind.

As a member of that audience, and one who pays full price to watch these video-games-on-celluloid, it's getting a little tedious. If Scott thinks truth is boring, he should sit in the seat next to me and listen to that never-ending voice-over that gives no scene a chance to develop a subtext. Whatever Domino thinks - or Scott wants us to know - comes out of her mouth. I've seen better subtlety watching Sesame Street. And despite all that eye-popping stream-of-consciousness, blender-edited visual screaming, it's a simple fact of life that you can't maintain a climax and have anything left for climax. From time immemorial, musicians and composers have known about something called "dynamics." You have go down to have room to go up - and vice versa. People who listen to nothing but ear-shattering music, all the time, eventually go deaf. People who stare at the sun not-so-eventually go blind. In between the roar and the quiet, between the searing light and the dark, there is a world of subtle, complex, differentiations - with tasty, fascinating nuance. But you won't catch any of it if you shoot the equivalent of a yellow-pages ad.

Tony Scott is 61 years old, so maybe it's a little late to say, "Grow up." When he takes something as moribund as the submarine genre and jazzes it up (Crimson Tide), I'll be the first to thank him for doing so. But there comes a point when music-video direction gets a little old, especially when it's like that video-security camera at 7/11, guarding a rack of Twinkies. Tony Scott's movies work best as trailers, as that's about the amount of time it takes to reach one's saturation point with a screaming blender-edited style that wears us out during the opening credits. It's like sitting down with a kid who has ADHD, whose endless chatter on 97 subjects at a time, eventually has its effect on even a soul's last working nerve. If the story being told were complex enough or deep enough, the visual chatter would be sufferable. As it is, Tony Scott has little to say about Domino Harvey, and is compensating with "sound and fury signifying nothing." Maybe that's why most of Domino feels like "a tale told by an idiot."

There has been some controversy over Scott's fictional overhaul of Domino Harvey's life - and whether Harvey, whose overdose may have been a suicide - was unhappy with her portrayal. Scott points to the number of times Harvey visited the shooting (as if that would have informed her of what was really going on) or Harvey's attendance at the wrap party. Truth be told, we'll never know, especially when so much of this tale is played out in tabloid rags. Three over-the-top "touches" by Tony Scott turned my stomach, which was already full of popcorn and Coke. First, he completely ignored the drug addiction, which formed a huge part of Domino Harvey's life - not only her reason for being in jail but as a cause of her death. Second, he includes a scene, following this fictional nightmare, between Harvey and her mother, where Harvey says, "I love you, Mum," complete with reaction shot. In fact, Harvey's relationship with her mother was so estranged by this point that neither had anything to do with the other. It's a clear attempt, on the part of Scott, to throw a bone to the family, perhaps to avoid lawsuits. Third, in addition to the "In Loving Memory" caption that shows us the real Domino Harvey, Scott trots out Keira Knightley to tell the press that Domino Harvey gave her carte blanche to tell her story any way she wants. If so, it would have been perhaps the first time, in the history of cinema, that the subject of a multi-million-dollar film, to be seen across the world, would have nothing to say about how her image was used, especially in a film that ended up doing a taffy-pull with the truth. And of course, Knightley's comments must be true. After all, where are Harvey's objections? Oh yeah. She's dead.

As for Keira Knightley, some will say she tripped over a landmine in playing this role, but I have nothing but respect for an actress who takes on so many different kinds of roles. With a body as attractive as hers, Knightley could make a career out of playing the same Cupie Dolls in an endless stream of "Pirates of the Caribbean" knock-offs. Instead, she has gone from playing Queen Amidala's decoy (Phantom Menace) to a soccer player (Bend It Like Beckham) to conventional arm ornament, Elizabeth Swann (Pirates of the Caribbean) to a version of Guinevere that channels Resident Evil (Arthur). In the Jacket, she played an angry, Goth-ish loser-with-a-heart, only to go on to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. Simply put, Knightley is as versatile as they come. If she lacks depth as an actress, she makes up for it in her Harvey-like determination to reinvent herself and push the envelope. Watching her in this film is almost always a joy, the one exception being a scene where she has to do a lap dance to resolve a life-or-death situation - and does it with her bra and panties on. (I don't know whether to be more annoyed with the exploitation of Knightley or the Disney-esque way it gets pulled off.) Knightley's British accent, cigarette-drooping smirk and her unflinching attitude make her performance, at least, one of the stronger points of what is otherwise a fairly dumb, over-the-top production.

I don't blame actors for what writers and directors are supposed to do, which is why I can say, with gusto, that all of the performances in this film - from Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique Imes-Jackson, Lucy Liu, Jackqueline Bisset, Christopher Walken, Mena Suvari, and even Jerry Springer - are first rate. I still think Mena Suvari gets a crappy role, stuck behind those 90s-style frames, but that's her problem. Christopher Walken and Mickey Rourke are stuck in that legendary status that makes them useful as "utility actors" - whenever a director wants something "on point" without having to try hard with the casting. In both cases, these larger-than-life figures take a little and make much of it.

Should you see Domino? That depends on the size of your wallet, and whether you go in expecting greatness or just something to bide your time while it's raining outside. As a carnival of sorts, the film is at least compelling enough to maintain our attention. It's impossible to describe as boring. And it certainly tries hard to "wow" us with visuals, even while the nonstop voice-over narration becomes increasingly numbing. If seen on cable or a two-dollar Mugs'n'Movies event, it's at least as good as Pitch Black, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Man on Fire and an assortment of big-budget flicks that operate on the same dynamics as Ron Howard's original Gone in Sixty Seconds. Watching this film reminds me of the exploitational flicks that used to grace the Tucson Five when I was a kid, the sticky, gooey, in-your-face carnival acts that went down with cold rootbeer and a burrito.

Not everything in life has to be great, and Domino Harvey's coke-injected myth is no exception. Had it tried less to be all things to all people, the film would have been more fun to watch, but Tony Scott walks us through so many woods, even he can't remember where we are by the time we hit the two-hour mark. There are parts of this film that belong in a Tarentino film. But then there's the false biopic, the television satire, the mini-relationship story between mother and daughter, and finally the Disney-esque wave goodbye. It's an even bigger mess than Domino Harvey's life, which Scott only considered compelling in snippets.

This is a second- or third-tier film, the kind you watch at a discount theater with no regrets.