Worth: $10.00
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Cast:
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Guy Pearce, Carine van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney
Intro:
Embrace it for its bloody-minded approach to recent politics, and you may have yourself a good time.
If you’ve had your ear to the ground, then you’ll likely already know about the production troubles that plagued Domino, the first film from Brian De Palma in seven years. Since production began in 2017, rumours of financial difficulties, cast changes and even production being put on hold after the first take have circulated the internet for some time.
De Palma himself, in a move reminiscent of Thomas Alfredson when discussing The Snowman, has shown no remorse when talking about the challenges he faced on set. Well, it’s two years later, Domino has finally hit Australian shores and the question is, was it worth the struggle? The short answer: sort of.
The plot sees Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Christian, a Danish cop on the hunt for the ISIS member who killed his partner. Having left his partner exposed after borrowing his firearm, Christian appears to carry some of the blame for his death. Joining in his hunt is Alex, a fellow cop played by Waldau’s former GOT co-star Carice van Houten.
Unbeknownst to either of them though, the ISIS member, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney) is actually in the employment of shady CIA operative Joe (Guy Pearce), who is holding Ezra’s family hostage until he carries out a series of assassinations on other ISIS members.
We follow both Ezra and Christian separately for a large part of Domino. And when we’re not following them, we’re looking over the shoulders of a sleeper cell of terrorists as they plot one violent act after another.
What we’re looking at here is a dense film filled with numerous characters and subplots. So, it’s no surprise that the film comes in at a running time of – checks notes – 89 minutes? No, really, what has the potential to be a behemoth with a labyrinthic plot has been condensed to less than an hour and a half, and it shows.
Plot threads dangle and resolution seems to have been left to the wayside. It’s not a spoiler to say that at one point, Pearce literally walks off-screen never to be seen again. It could be the fault of screenwriter Petter Skavlan (Kon-Tiki), whose dialogue echoes tinny throughout. The more realistic possibility, however, is that Domino was a much longer film that someone somewhere has decided to cut their losses on, shave as much off as they could and still call it a movie; a similar fate that befell Keanu Reeves’ Daughter of God in 2016.
That said, the narrative problems genuinely aren’t an issue for the first half of the film. With a bombastic score that has De Palma’s fingerprints all over it from one note to the next, Domino carefully sets up its stall, giving us insights into the lives of its leading players and setting out the landscape on which they’ll move.
Later on, there’s a stellar rooftop chase between Ezra and Christian that genuinely makes you catch your breath. Then we tip over the halfway mark, and Domino hurtles towards the finish like De Palma’s using roller-skates on a greased-up slide, almost mitigating all its good intentions in one sloppy final act.
In all honesty, if the film hadn’t been so evidently manhandled by its editor, what remains still suggests that Domino is far from being the hidden masterpiece you’d want it to be. Pearce’s pantomime performance jars with the furrowed brow of a tone that’s reflected through the rest of the film, for example. Additionally, it seems a little too soon after the events of the Christchurch shooting to be including a scene where a terrorist attack at an awards show is shown from the shooter’s POV. Yes, the film is technically two years old, and could never have predicted the horror, but it still sticks in the craw considering the superfluous nature of the scene.
Overall, and despite its good intentions, Domino starts off strong but is unable to stick its landing. Embrace it for its bloody-minded approach to recent politics, and you may have yourself a good time. However, it’s impossible to say that this is one of De Palma’s finest.