Z/Web

Director: Tony Scott

This film looked unusual and interesting in the promos, and I’m a huge Keira Knightly fan, but I’m sad to say the film doesn’t work. I actually liked the director’s unusual style which is in-your-face and aggressive, like the title character, a model-turned-bounty hunter. Unfortunately, it’s the script that’s bad. The first problem is that the story is told in reverse order, via flashbacks, a forumla that works for some movies, but fails for this one. In this case it fails because the story isn’t really that interesting or unusual enough for us to put up with the technique. The other problem is that the writer (and director) seem to be overly enamored with the whole “bounty hunter” thing, as though it were the greatest or most unusual profession in the world. Granted it’s not that common a profession, especially for a beautiful model, but we don’t need to be reminded of that every two minutes. “Ooh, look at Domino be tough! Ooh, look at sexy Domino shoot a gun!” The story, which is overly convoluted because of the flashback technique, is disappointing in its ordinariness: it’s basically just a standard “oops we robbed a mobster” plot. I really wanted to like this and tried hard for almost the duration of the entire film, but in the end, I was left disappointed and cheated. It was a neat idea, but the film’s dramatic camera technique and unique visual style set the viewer up for great drama and the film only delivers disappointment.