BEFORE: Dale Dickey carries over from "Blood Father" - I know, I know, I already used Dale Dickey as a link the first week of this year, to connect "Being Flynn" and "Leave No Trace". Who says I can't use her as a link twice in the same month? I make up the rules around here, and putting all the Dale Dickey films together just didn't work for me, I had to split them up into two groups to get the "proper" distribution of films for the month. She's so nice, I linked her twice.
And she'll be here again tomorrow as I wrap up January - and you know what February's going to be about, if not, then you haven't been paying attention.
THE PLOT: Domino Harvey turned away from her career as a Ford model to become a bounty hunter.
AFTER: OK, here's what happened - I recorded this film several months back, after, well, avoiding it for years. Mea culpa. But I took the time and effort (and perhaps a $3.99 expense) to dub it to DVD, to clear off space on my DVR, which tends to fill up. I greatly prefer to watch films on the DVR because I can then turn the subtitles on (I'm like half deaf in the right ear) - and when I burn films to DVD, the subtitles don't come through. Maybe they would if I went from DVR straight to DVD, but I choose to dub to VHS tape first, just in case something goes wrong during the dub to DVD, I can't just "do it over", going to tape first gives me a level of control, I can make sure the film is THERE on the tape, all the way through, and sure, sometimes I have to re-dub, like if I used a bad VHS tape or something, but generally speaking this gives me a bit more control over the process - and this way I can set the DVD burner up with the signal from the VHS and walk away, I (usually) don't have to baby-sit the dubbing.
So I've got the film on DVD, ready to watch it late last night, when I decided to check for the film on streaming services (it's not on any, which is a bad sign) or On Demand - OK, no longer available to stream on any of the major channels, but the film WAS scheduled to play at 2 am on one of the Cinemax channels, I think. It was midnight when I saw the film was going to air at 2 am, so I decided to wait, because this meant I could turn on the subtitles and then understand what everyone was saying. Just an hour of "TMZ" and some phone games to fill the time, and before long it was 2 am and "Domino" started airing - although I didn't see Keira Knightley anywhere in the first five minutes, you'd think she'd be front and center. And why does that guy look familiar...more importantly there are two cops in the opening scenes named Christian and Lars, and I don't see those character names anywhere in the IMDB listing for "Domino". Am I watching the right movie?
No, I was not. There is another movie titled "Domino" that came out in 2019, starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (from "Gods of Egypt", "Oblivion" and most recently, "Kingdom of Heaven" and this so-called PREMIUM cable channel was running "Domino" (2019) but they'd listed it in the program guide as "Domino" (2005). Jesus, doesn't anybody who works for a cable channel even CHECK to make sure they're running the right movie? Or that the listing matches what's being played on screen? This is what keeps happening with "Kicking and Screaming", the Noah Baumbach film from 1995 about college students - if you're hoping to watch this movie and you see it listed or you DVR it, you'll probably end up watching "Kicking & Screaming", the 2005 soccer comedy starring Will Ferrell. Cable companies, we NEED you to do better! Maybe try hiring somebody to WATCH your channel or check the listings for mistakes! Hell, hire me to do that, I'll sit and watch all the channels all day long to make sure the listings are correct, and I'll only charge, let's say, $20 an hour. But won't it be worth it to have good Quality Control?
Anyway, once I realized that I was watching the WRONG film named "Domino", i quickly switched the TV input to "DVD" and began watching the dub I made off cable months ago, with NO subtitles, and man, was I pissed. I could have started the film two hours earlier, and also gone to bed two hours earlier, if not for this screw-up on the part of whoever programs the cable listings. The system's been hell since TV Guide closed up shop, amiright?
Even worse news, when I started watching the CORRECT "Domino", I realized that it was a hot mess of a movie - so maybe I should have stuck with the WRONG "Domino", only that would have broken the chain and thrown my life into (even more) chaos. No, I had to stick it out and watch the correct "Domino", but then I ended up staying up later than I anticipated, because THIS "Domino" was two hours long, not 90 minutes. But wait, I've got a whole bunch of reasons to hate this film, like the fact that it STARTS with the big showdown scene between the bounty hunters and the armored truck thieves, then it snaps back to the beginning, three weeks before, to spend the rest of the movie explaining how they got there. Meanwhile, nearly EVERYTHING is a flashback, because model-turned-bounty-hunter (don't worry, we're gonna get THERE...) is narrating the whole story to a criminal psychologist (umm, yeah) so there's flashbacks within flashbacks and time has no meaning and everything happens randomly, and I just can't stand that technique.
The whole movie is shot in that MTV "shaky-cam" style that was used on "Cribs" and "Remote Control" and will make you nauseous if you let it. Wait, I'm just gettin' started - the shooting style is meant to disorient you and distract you from the fact that the whole plot here is confusing as hell, nothing adds up right, so really, it's all hot garbage - all flash and no narrative substance.
Now, let's get to the details, this is supposedly based on a true story, but I really really doubt it - fashion models just DO NOT become bounty hunters, because there's no skill set overlap there. The "real" Domino Harvey got into ONE FIGHT during a fashion show, and suddenly she's qualified to catch criminals? I think not. She sees a newspaper advertisement for a bounty hunting training seminar? I'm pretty sure that's not really a thing. In fact, it's not, the whole thing was somebody's get-rich-quick scam, but she was the only person who complained that the seminar was useless and a rip-off, so that somehow qualifies her to become a REAL bounty hunter? That's not how ANYTHING works. If I took a bank teller training course, and I got scammed in the process, that wouldn't qualify me to work as a bank teller, I'd just be in the same exact place as I was before, namely NOT qualified.
But somehow this qualifies Domino to become part of a four-person team, three bounty hunters and a driver, working for a bail bondsman who also runs an armored car service (again, that's probably not how jobs work). The bondsman has a mistress who works for the DMV and whose granddaughter is sick from a rare blood disease and needs a $300,000 operation - so the Bellini is to have four Mullinskis rob the owner of a casino, then have his four bounty hunters return the stolen money and collect $300,000 as a finders fee. Umm, NITPICK POINT, if this guy runs an armored car business, why does he need to rob a mobster? Why not just stage a robbery of one of his own armored cars, and then hire his bounty hunters to solve the case, and/or collect the insurance money like any other normal American would do? This alternative is just plain stupid.
The woman who works at the DMV is also running a racket to hand out counterfeit licenses, and the FBI finds out about it, so she tells the FBI that these four kids who got fake IDs are also the ones who robbed the armored car, which makes things about ten times more complicated than they need to be. Two of the kids getting fake licenses just HAPPEN to be the sons of the mafia boss who gets robbed, so in a weird twist of fate, these unlucky bastards are getting framed for stealing from their own mobster father, and they almost get executed by mobsters for the job they didn't do. OK, NITPICK POINT again, wouldn't the mobsters trying to kill the robbers maybe have noticed that two of them are their boss's sons? It is a "family", after all. Or why wouldn't the teens have spoken up at that point, to say, "Hey, we wouldn't rob the casino, our father is Anthony Cigliutti, and he's YOUR BOSS!" Again, the alternative to this is what happens, and it's just plain stupid.
Meanwhile, the whole bounty hunting operation gets their own reality TV show, something akin to "Dog, the Bounty Hunter", I guess, only with a four-person team, and the show is hosted (?) by two former cast members of "Beverly Hills 90210" - one of which is the actor who's so stupid he doesn't know that his name is supposed to be pronounced "EE-an" and not "EYE-an". Just saying. The bounty hunters are tasked with tracking down the fake robbers, you know, for the TV show, and after they find them, the casino owner almost kills them, but after learning that they have no idea where the money is, he lets them go. Sure, because that's what you do. Meanwhie the bounty hunters, thinking they just got four innocent teens killed, are forced to do their jobs and track down the REAL bank robbers, which takes us back to the end of the movie that was seen at the beginning. Once they get the $10 million, it only makes sense that they should bring it back to the casino owner, clear the fake robbers' names, and collect their finder's fee. So of course they DON'T do that, they do something completely stupid instead.
The bounty hunters face off against the casino owner's crew and ALSO the mobster's crew, so yeah, there's a lot of shooting and a lot of explosions and it's all so very unnecessary. And stupid. I guarantee you that whatever Domino Harvey's life as a fashion model turned bounty hunter was like, it was nothing like this.
Also starring Keira Knightley (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Mickey Rourke (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Delroy Lindo (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Rizz Abbasi, Mo'Nique, Ian Ziering, Brian Austin Green, Joe Nunez (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Macy Gray (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Shondrella Avery (last seen in "End of Watch"), Dabney Coleman (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Peter Jacobson (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Kel O'Neill, Lucy Liu (last seen in "The Man with the Iron Fists"), Jacqueline Bisset (last seen in "Two for the Road"), Lew Temple (last seen in "Adrienne"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Mena Suvari (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), Jerry Springer, T.K. Carter (last seen in "The Way Back"), Charles Paraventi (last seen in "Man on Fire"), Frederick Koehler (last seen in "The Little Things"), Tom Waits (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Stanley Kamel, Ashley Monique Clark, Adam Clark (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Janet Gonzalez, Mike G. (also last seen in "The Way Back"), Eddie Hernandez, Mark Newsom, Jack McGee (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Morgan Nagler, Ginger Kinison, Michelle Fabiano (last seen in "Must Love Dogs"), Phillip Darlington
with archive footage of Gabrielle Carteris, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth, Jason Priestley, Anne Robinson, Frank Sinatra (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Laurence Harvey (last seen in "F for Fake").
RATING: 3 out of 10 times the RV flips over
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