Watch the tower tumble for this legendary filmmaker
Brian De Palma has a new film out. Hold on. Before you get excited, it should be acknowledged that the director took considerably great pains (perhaps some of the greatest in his career) to bring his latest project, the espionage thriller Domino, to the screen. The film can sadly boast one of the most troubled productions in the director’s past thanks to shady financial backers whose budgetary promises quickly dwindled as filming went on. Almost instantly, De Palma soon found his artistic vision severely compromised while he saw members of his crew go without pay after the producers failed to come up with the funds to pay their salaries, let alone fully finance the film. Still, fans of the legendary director knows he’s faced battles of all kinds, from being thrown out by the city of Miami when filming Scarface, managing to survive the jungles (not to mention Sean Penn) of Thailand in Casualties of War and contending with dueling screenwriters on Mission: Impossible. In any case, cinephiles (at least this one) felt confident that with Domino, De Palma could deliver the cinematic goods, regardless of whatever troubles he had to endure in doing so. However, as the final product has proven, the worry was justified.
In Domino, Copenhagen detective Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is on a mission to bring rightful justice to the killer of his partner. Reluctantly, he is joined on the hunt for the elusive killer by fellow officer Alex (Carice Van Houten), whose reasons for hunting down criminal stem from something more personal. The two have their work cut out for them as the killer seems to protected by a mysterious CIA agent (Guy Pearce) with his own dangerous agenda.
The problems with Domino are evident, although not at first. Following a more than decent opening, things quickly take a turn for the worse as the movie’s low budget trappings line up to present themselves. It’s so plainly obvious that the money for Domino started to run out as an increasingly choppy feeling begins to take over, giving the film an awkwardly rushed pace. For a filmmaker like De Palma, who made a career of savoring the essence of every moment, the result is slightly offputting as the audience is essentially watching a director battle his own film; trying to hold onto his instincts as an artist as the movie looks to run right past him. Not helping matters is perhaps one of the dullest scripts the director has ever had the misfortune of working with. From a plot standpoint, I’m sure that the original draft of Domino was far more layered, and perhaps involving, than the hack job that represented the final cut. As it stands, every turn within Domino comes with very little surprise or shock. Almost as uninspired as the plot, are the lackluster characters at the center of things. It’s hard to say whether the individuals writer Petter Skavlan created were likewise victims of budgetary constraints, or were just never fleshed out to begin with. Either way, no one here feels real enough, nor interesting enough to elicit whatever emotion they’re aiming for, be it sympathy or fear.
Still, De Palma is a master; and because he is a master, his talent can’t help but show itself no matter what the circumstances may be. This is almost immediately proven with Domino’s aforementioned opening which instantly catches the eye and the pulse. Continuing on his lifelong Alfred Hitchcock tribute, the director employs shades of both Vertigo and To Catch a Thief in Christian’s initial pursuit of his partner’s assailant. As is his trademark, De Palma injects a mix of dizzying camera angles, kaleidoscopic colors and tense (yet oddly dreamy) music for a chase sequence which is certain to make every fan of the director’s watching proclaim: “THIS is De Palma!” By the time Domino reaches its conclusion, the “pieced together” feeling has gone on for so long, that the sequence actually feels anticlimactic; at least from a story angle. But the director knows the power and potential of such a scene and proves this by presenting a sequence fraught with the kind of tension he does so well. The director shows multiple life-threatening moments taking place simultaneously with each of the movie’s characters played out in slow-mo with gorgeous operatic music playing as the audience is (belatedly) pulled back into the world of Domino for a finale much more impressive than it ever deserved. It’s a spectacular sequence in the tradition of The Untouchables and Snake Eyes, yet never once does the director come across as if he’s copying himself, but rather basking in the familiar and transferring it to the present.
I’ve always felt (and I’m sure I’ve stated this before) that actors can only do so much with the material in front of them; Domino more than proves this to be true. No one within the cast is necessarily bad, per say, but there’s something a bit uninspired about everyone’s performances. Each of the actors has more than enough experience under his or her belt, that there presence here makes perfect sense. Yet the inability for their characters to exist beyond the page stifles an otherwise capable cast, all of whom doubtless counted their lucky stars for being chosen to star in a De Palma film. Only Van Houten, through looks of pain and toughness manages to evoke anything close to a good performance in a largely lost group.
De Palma has gone on record about how awful making Domino was for him, stating: “ I never experienced such a horrible movie set.” Before this, the title of worst filmmaking experience in De Palma’s career went to The Bonfire of the Vanities. The myriad of problems on that production, including a difficult Bruce Willis, meddling producers, a script not many were happy with, bad advance press, the pressure of adapting a bestselling novel and Melanie Griffith getting breast implants midway through production, were all wonderfully chronicled in the excellent book “The Devil’s Candy.” Yet it’s more than a little telling that Domino should be the director’s least favorite time behind the camera, enough to sort of want a book chronicle of it. Here, there’s enough here to see what could have been, making this an overall mournful experience for fans. But with the flashes of brilliance which do manage to shine through here and future projects, including the intriguing self-scripted Sweet Vengeance on the horizon, the arrival of a new Brian De Palma film is something still very much worth getting excited about.