Domino (2)

Monday October 17, 2005 - 10:59PM EDT

As far as movie making goes this wasn't a great movie. The trailers were much more interesting and without the star power of Knightley I doubt anyone would even give this thing a chance. Plot is not very strong but it isn't garbage. It is highly stylized in its look. Which at first was annoying but you got used to it. The most annoying part was the opening credits. It was like they need to waste a few minutes and did this whole complex montage that was unnecessary. They could have used that time to fill in some more of the plot. Things I liked about this movie. I grew to like the stylized look of the film. It was adaquately gritty in its apperance. Complex blocking and lots of things in frame in a lot of scenes worked. I liked Knightley. All the actors did a good job. Acting did not fail this movie. Things I didn't like about this movie. Weak characters. With the exception of the titular character we didn't get very much backstory about the other two major players except a sentence or two from Domino. I think a little more backstory would have done them good. Make them more interesting. Even the history of Domino was pretty weak. We see the different stages of her life but we are not treated to those key points that made her change with the exception of her father's death. I guess we are supposed to infer that her father's death made her what she is but that is a jump too far to make. As for the other characters they are too flat. They seem like complex people but we don't know why or have any clue to it so we don't care. The most interesting peripheral character is the Afghanistan driver. They show two little scenes of his childhood in Afghanistan that gives you a sense of were he comes from. It also makes his gung-ho statments about fighting for a "free Afghanistan" that much more interesting. I don't know why they didn't do the same with the two other major characters that accompanied Domino. Like they say one character grew up on the streets of Venezuela and that he stabbed someone in the eye when he was 4 but that is it. They didn't even give some kind of flashback or mention anything else. I really can't describe the plot as anything else but weak. You give liberties with action movies as to believability but that wasn't the problem with the plot. It was just plain boring at times and scenes were far fetched. It really only got entertaining the last 30 minutes of the movie. Overall it was bland. I think because it started out as a deep character study but never went deep enough then changed into a straight out action flick. Not that you can't mix the two but it didn't do a good job of it.