E arly in Brian De Palma’s Domino, Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) wakes at daybreak and tries to roll out of the arms of his lover.The camera peers down at the detective and ever so slowly zooms in on his bed. Soon it becomes apparent that the camera isn’t even interested in the happy couple, but the gun set off to the side.
How Domino Fits into the Brian De Palma ParadoxbyJesse HassengerMay 29, 2019 ’s new movie “” is coming out to little fanfare this week, in a few theaters and on VOD. Even the legendary director himself, in an around this time last year, appeared to write off the movie as a job for hire that didn’t work out to his liking (though he describes financial problems with the producers more so than specifying grievances with the final film).
It gives me no pleasure to report that “Domino” is, indeed, one of his lesser pictures.To be clear, this isn’t the kind of “lesser” De Palma movie that will be experienced broadly as a self-indulgent failure, but beloved by the. After all, it’s a few years too early for De Palma to deliver one of his once-a-decade palate-cleansers like “Raising Cain” (1992), “” (2002), or “” (2012), where he circles back to the seamy thrillers he made in the ’70s and early ’80s and gives himself a split-screen, split-diopter, and/or long-take workout. And despite his characterization of “Domino” as not his project (as in not originating with him), it’s not one of those hired-gun jobs where his craftsmanship elevates a studio thriller, like “” or “.” No, “Domino” is more akin to a low-budget version of some of De Palma’s least-loved output, misbegotten efforts like “,” “Mission to Mars,” and “The Black Dahlia”—the studio movies that convinced him not to make studio movies anymore.Advertisement. Similarly, “Mission to Mars” has an old-fashioned gee-whiz approach to science fiction that’s somewhat off-putting in its tin-eared (if well-shot) opening stretch and borderline infuriating in its limping of an ending, but perfectly complements the harrowing, exciting adventure of its escape sequence. (Intentionally or not, it’s one of De Palma’s most earnestly dorky movies.) As an excuse for De Palma to float his camera around the interior of a spacecraft, it’s, well, the only De Palma movie that has scenes on the interior of a spacecraft. “Snake Eyes” deflates after its dynamite opening, yes, but in a gradual way that at least matches the fading bravado of the crooked cop played.
Moreover, Cage’s frantic smarm in the opening sequence is so well-matched to the roving show-off energy of De Palma’s camera that, upon subsequent viewings, it doesn’t much matter what happens next.“Domino” doesn’t have a star performance to carry it along, but it does have its obligatory highlight-reel moments to open and close things up. The first one, beginning with a long push-in to establish that the cop has forgotten his firearm at home, and continuing through his partner’s murder and the murderer’s escape, is well-squeezed pulp, and the movie’s finale, involving an attempted terrorist attack at a stadium, applies that slow-burn Hitchcockian verve to a disconcertingly contemporary setting. There’s some attempt to point De Palma’s voyeurism toward the exhibition of modern terrorism, but it only occasionally tracks with what actually happens in the movie. Brian De Palma on the set of 'Domino'Maybe future repeat viewings of those good parts will be kind to “Domino” overall, just as its big-studio cousins that don’t hang together are less frustrating in retrospect. But in some ways, those two scenes are all “Domino” really needs. In the right frame of mind, coming across a couple of holy-mackerel sequences in an otherwise clumsy movie creates its own kind of ecstasy—not exclusive to this filmmaker, of course, but particularly compatible with his interests and obsessions.Advertisement.
De Palma has been both hailed and criticized for making self-justifying movie-movies, full of homages, films within films, and B-picture artifice, and even his most evenhanded films have especially memorable set pieces that jut out of them prominently. In his more wildly uneven work, those masterful stretches feel weirdly authentic to the experience of watching a lot of movies—in fact, they resemble the critic-like practice of sifting through hundreds of releases and finding the occasional moment of transcendence. He’s one of the best filmmakers alive at gussying up simple thriller actions—a murder, a chase, the discovery of a body—into beguiling, elaborate movies unto themselves, sometimes to the point of liberating them from their original homes in perfunctory, confusing, or uninvolving narratives.
It’s a talent both expansive and, in a pleasurable way, reductive. There’s a purity to a mixed-bag De Palma movie that some genuinely successful movies will never achieve. Would his filmography be as much fun without them?
Quentin Tarantino is fond of saying that no filmmakers make their best work at the end of their careers. When the quote originated, he was referring to Billy Wilder, but he could just as easily have been talking about Brian De Palma, who made a masterpiece in 2002’s Femme Fatale, but since then has struggled to get anything resembling his best work to screen. The Black Dahlia, Redacted, Passion, and now Domino, his latest and first feature since 2012, present a picture of a filmmaker whose finest days may be behind him. Those hoping that Domino might recapture the brilliance of Blow Out or Dressed to Kill would be better served revisiting Blow Out or Dressed to Kill.Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays Christian, a police officer in Copenhagen whose partner is wounded when the two of them attempt to bring down a member of ISIS (played by Eriq Ebouaney). He’s turned over to a shady CIA agent (Guy Pearce, hamming it up with a Southern drawl), who enlists the terrorist to bring down other members of ISIS and get justice for the murder of his father. Meanwhile, Christian and a fellow officer (Carice Van Houten) are on a revenge mission of their own, out to take down the terrorist who put their friend—and possibly more—in the hospital.There are very few bigger fans of Brian De Palma than me, so it brings me no joy to say that Domino is among the director’s worst films.
Of course, even saying that much depends on how much we can call this “his” film. The director has more or less disowned the production, stating in the press that it was never his script, that the shoot was a terrible experience, that producers failed to pay the crew, and that it was basically taken out of his hands. De Palma’s cut of the film is rumored to originally have been two and a half hours, offering plenty of room for the multiple subplots to play out and develop before converging in the final act.
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The released cut of Domino clocks in at 82 minutes before the end credits roll, suggesting a great deal of post-production butchering, more than likely without any input from the director. What we have, then, is what Roger Ebert used to refer to as a “murdered movie.” It’s a shame when a true artist like De Palma has his vision compromised and his movie is murdered, but I can’t review the movie that doesn’t exist. I can’t solve the murder. I can only examine the corpse.Domino leaves a rather unfortunate corpse, but that’s to be expected when a movie has an entire hour gutted out of it. There are two set pieces, one at the beginning and one at the end, that feel like classic De Palma. The first, following the ill-fated arrest and a chase across rooftops, is so well-constructed that it almost makes the movie worth seeing on its own.
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The rest of the movie, unfortunately, feels cheap and rushed. It’s nearly impossible to care for characters this ill-defined, and there are jarring tonal shifts between gritty spy thriller and comical melodrama—two tastes that don’t taste great together. There are pieces of what might have been an interesting, ambitious film left on screen, but that’s all they are: pieces.There are movies that try and just don’t work and there are movies that never really stood a chance. Domino is the latter, thanks to interference and second-guessing and what sounds to have been a catastrophe from start to finish. I will still (and always) be excited at the prospect of a new Brian De Palma movie, but this one fails to reward my optimism. Here’s hoping that the director has at least one more great film in him before deciding to hang it up forever.
I would hate for a career as brilliant as his to end on this sour a note.Movie Score: 2/5. Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror.
Some of his favorites include Dr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse.
He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.