Man on Fire

When I first watched Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (2004) shortly after it was released on home video, I dismissed it as an empty exercise in trying to recreate the 1980s action movie that the director himself helped popularize with the likes of Top Gun (1986) and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987). I was put off by the film’s wildly fractured editing, jump cuts and slow motion mayhem but now I realize – only with the benefit of hindsight – that I didn’t understand what he was trying to do. With Man on Fire, Scott was leaving behind traditionally presented storytelling in favor of what Nick Clement has described as “cubist-cinema,” utilizing experimental editing rhythms and camerawork to immerse the viewer in the worldview of the protagonist so that we are experiencing things almost as fast the way the mind works. This film would be his first foray with this approach but not the last, culminating in his masterpiece Domino (2005).

Scott boldly introduces this new aesthetic in the opening credits, which depict a man being kidnapped in a public place in broad daylight with its entire tragic arc playing out via rapid, jarring edits and a grungy visual look that is aggressively in-your-face. With this sequence, Scott is making a statement by establishing not just the style of the film but also his subsequent works. It’s a ballsy move on his part but then I wouldn’t expect anything less.

Former CIA operative John Creasy (Denzel Washington) is more than down on his luck; like previous Scott protagonist, Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) in The Last Boy Scout (1991), he has hit rock bottom with a head full of regrets. He has spent his life doing his country’s dirty work and has become an alcoholic in desperate need of some redemption. As he tells an old friend early on, “Do you think God’ll forgive us for what we’ve done?” For the rest of the film, Creasy is looking for this forgiveness.

He visits Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken), an old friend from his CIA days who now runs a security firm in Mexico. He tells Creasy about a job: bodyguard for an affluent Mexican family. The father, Samuel Ramos (Marc Anthony) is a car plant owner and he asks Creasy to drive his daughter Pita (Dakota Fanning), to and from her exclusive private school every day.

Creasy takes a shine to Pita who gradually chips away at his shell of burnt-out cynicism. He actually begins to care about something. As if on cue, Creasy is ambushed one day and shot up in a chaotic gun battle that results in Pita being kidnapped. To make matters worse, Creasy is framed for killing two corrupt cops. The husband messes up the ransom pick-up, effectively signing his daughter’s death warrant. Understandably upset, Creasy, with the help of Rayburn, decides to exact some good ol’ fashion revenge and find and kill everyone responsible for the kidnapping as he works his way up the country’s ladder of corruption.

Scott spends the first fifty minutes establishing the relationship between Creasy and Pita. As we watch them bond there is a nervous anticipation as we wait for the other shoe to drop. When will she get kidnapped? Once Creasy amasses a sizable arsenal for his revenge mission, the film veers dangerously close to taking all leave of its senses as it almost becomes one of those one-man-army action movies that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made popular in the 1980s complete with the dubious moral underpinnings.

Scott immerses us in the Mexican underworld where kidnappings are rampant as Creasy tracks down the people who have taken Pita utilizing his unique skill sets. It’s a grim Death Wish (1974) meets Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) kind of journey as the director rubs our faces in ugly, brutal violence as Creasy tortures and kills his way up the kidnapping food chain. At this point we’ve become invested in Creasy’s journey and on a basic level welcome his scorched earth policy because we want to see the bad guys punished.

Outside of his very successful collaborations with Spike Lee, Scott was able to get the very best from Denzel Washington. They obviously had a real kinship and enjoyed working together as evident from their numerous collaborations. The actor understood his director’s worldview to the extent that he was able to convey it successfully on-screen.

Washington certainly makes an impressively ferocious and determined assassin dedicated to making those responsible pay with their lives. He fearlessly plumbs the depths of his character and goes to even darker places than he did in Training Day (2001). The actor is very effective at playing a drunk with nothing left to lose. He looks the part, sporting a ragged, uneven beard early on. Even after he’s cleaned himself up for the job there is a look in Creasy’s eyes and the way he carries himself that conveys the vibe of a self-destructive burn-out while still maintaining the air of a highly trained professional. It is a tricky balancing act that Washington pulls off effortlessly. His gig with the Ramos family is probably his last chance at a halfway decent gig. The actor also conveys a tragic vibe, hinting at a time when he was on top of his game but has since lost his way.

The scenes between Creasy and Pita are refreshingly devoid of the cutesy shtick that most relationships of this kind are portrayed and this is because he doesn’t talk down to her. He’s honest with her and she isn’t one of those annoying kids. The interplay between them feels natural and builds gradually, showing how they bond over her swimming competitions, with the little girl holding her own against the veteran actor. Like Creasy, we become emotionally invested in Pita and care about what happens to her. He also realizes that she may be the key to the redemption he so desperately needs.

Scott’s frenetic editing is effective throughout, especially in the scene were Creasy and Pita are idling at a traffic light and are beset by panhandlers. While he tries to continue an uncomfortable conversation with her, he deals with all of these distractions and the editing conveys the disorientating effects all these sights and sounds have on him. It is ominous, visual foreshadowing of what’s to come.

This hyper-kinetic editing is also used during moments when Creasy is alone, wallowing in self-doubt and a powerful moment where he hits rock bottom. It is heavy-handed but that’s the point as Scott wants us to experience this man’s troubled worldview. He wants to immerse us in it so that it’s almost tangible for the director is a sensualist.

The film’s first action sequence – Pita’s kidnapping – is a fantastic showcase for Scott’s new direction in depicting action. We are thrown into a chaotic situation from Creasy’s perspective, including him picking up the signs of the impending kidnapping and then his increasingly disintegrating point-of-view as his gunshot wounds disable him. The editing creates a disorienting effect, which is intentional. The last hour of Man on Fire sees Scott cut loose with this new style as he gets down and dirty with his own version of The Limey (1999) as Creasy exacts revenge on those responsible for kidnapping Pita albeit filtered through his fractured mind.

Regency Enterprises owner Arnon Milchan purchased the film rights to A.J. Quinnell’s 1980 novel Man on Fire because he believed it had cinematic potential. He approached Tony Scott, who had just come off of directing The Hunger (1982), and the director was enthusiastic about the material but he ended up not doing it. Scott moved on Top Gun (1986) while Milchan went on to produce the 1987 version starring Scott Glenn, but over the years the filmmaker never forgot about it: “I never really lost sight of it.”

Years later, producer Lucas Foster teamed up with Regency to adapt Man on Fire yet again with screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) writing the script. In 2003, Scott agreed to direct. Helgeland’s initial drafts were set in Italy but Foster and Scott found out that tough new laws had virtually eliminated kidnappings there and scouted locations in Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico. They picked Mexico because kidnapping had become commonplace there: “Kidnapping is a huge business there – very controlled and organized. It’s an actual industry,” he said. To this end, he researched case histories of kidnappings in Mexico and had Helgeland adjust the script accordingly.

Scott had previously worked with Denzel Washington on Crimson Tide (1995) and knew he wanted him to play Creasy because of his “obsessive quality and his internal darkness. There’s a hardness to Denzel that’s really interesting. He knows how to draw it out and use it effectively.” After seeing Dakota Fanning act opposite Sean Penn in I Am Sam (2001), Foster and Scott cast her as Pita. She spent months on swimming training, Spanish lessons and piano lessons.” Originally, Scott thought of casting Christopher Walken as the Ramos’ corrupt lawyer but the actor told him that he was tired of playing bad guys and wanted to play someone good. Scott decided to cast him as Rayburn instead.

The traffic-congested Mexico City proved to be a challenge for the production as they moved more than 50 vehicles of cast, crew and equipment through the narrow and crowded streets. In addition, general strikes were a daily occurrence forcing them to navigate Mexico City’s complex bureaucracy of 17 mini-states, each with its own municipality and governor.

To create the stunning look of Man on Fire, Scott worked closely with director of photography Paul Cameron (Swordfish) in an attempt to reflect Creasy’s emotional state by doing things like hand-cranking the camera to slow down or speed up movement, using reversal film stock to make colors more vivid, creating multiple exposures by imprinting three sets of images on the same plate of film, and for some sequences employing multiple cameras, which caused Washington to refer to his director as “Nine-Camera Tony.”

Man on Fire received mostly negative reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “Man on Fire has a production too ambitious for the foundation supplied by the screenplay. It plays as if Scott knows the plot is threadbare, and wants to patch it with an excess of style.” USA Today also gave it two-and-a-half out of four stars with Mike Clark writing, “Seventeen years from now, we may well remember this version of the story – just as one remembers getting hammered on the head repeatedly with a 2-by-4.” In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “Mr. Scott, meanwhile, with his characteristic blend of cynicism and heavy-handedness, infuses even the quietest moments with nerve-jangling dread.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D” rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “But the movie’s mortal failing is echoed in the religious medal Pita gives Creasy in a gift of innocent, uplifting love: Finding heft or coherence within all the lugubrious agitation is a lost cause worthy of St. Jude.” Finally, in his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Despite its high craft level and Washington’s participation in it, this movie’s showy violence is finally as deadening as the over-emphatic violence in these kinds of films generally is.”

Man on Fire trades in the same kind of redemptive nihilism as Scott’s underrated thriller Revenge (1990), which is also a very sensual film. Both are prime examples of his romantic tendencies albeit in very Peckinpahian terms – i.e. tough love bathed in violence. On a superficial level, this film is a throwback to the ‘80s Hollywood action film, which featured the lone, empowered American who shows the uncultured natives the true meaning of power through military might with God as his co-pilot. In this respect, the politics in Scott’s film are troubling to say the least. By setting it in Mexico and showcasing the levels of corruption that exist there, Man on Fire will certainly not be featured in that country’s tourism brochures any time soon.

SOURCE

Man on Fire Production Notes. 20^th Century Fox. 2004.

The Last Boy Scout

Shane Black's career has had a fascinating, meteoric rise and fall (and perhaps to rise again). The screenwriter hit the big time when his breakthrough screenplay for Lethal Weapon (1987) sold for $250,000. This kick-started a wildly popular action film franchise. He soon hit rock bottom with the heavily re-written (by others) modest hit, The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), the script of his which sold for a staggering $4 million). And yet, even his weaker efforts still contain decent action sequences and playful banter between characters. What seemed to be missing in Black's later films was depth and characterization – elements that made his screenplays distinctive. Perhaps this was as a result of meddling and script revisions at the hands of others. For Black, screenwriting came easy: “The fact that there were so few rules associated with it, so few actual structural maxims … you can just do what you want. So I played around and it was fun. I would just type to keep myself entertained. It turned out people liked that. They felt it represented an interesting way to go, but for me it was truly just typing to keep myself entertained.”

However, studio executives were only interested in using Black to write formulaic drivel. Determined to make it, he wrote Lethal Weapon. The script was a blast of fresh air and ended up being made into a big budget action film starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. This kind of thing almost never happens in Hollywood and it’s a testimony to Black’s skill as a screenwriter that he achieved this kind of success so early on in his career. Lethal Weapon grossed over a $100 million. In the best tradition of Hollywood, money talks and so in 1990, Black was paid $1.75 million (an unheard of amount at the time) for The Last Boy Scout script. The next year it was made into a 1991 action movie starring Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans and directed by the late Tony Scott.

The film starts off literally with a bang as a pro-football player (a pre-infomerical Billy Blanks) pulls out a handgun right in the middle of a play and shoots three opposing players in his way to getting a touchdown before killing himself. Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) is a private detective hired by his best friend (Bruce McGill) to protect a stripper named Cory (Halle Berry in an early role). The best friend is subsequently blown up in a car and the stripper gunned down by thugs. Her washed-up, football-playing boyfriend (Damon Wayans) hooks up with Joe to get some answers and some much needed payback.

"I had this period where I didn't think I was any good at anything and fought desperately to stay afloat," Black said in an interview with Creative Screenwriting magazine. And with that feeling in mind, Black wrote a movie that pushes the world-weary detective stereotype to then new, surreal levels. Willis' performance and Black's screenplay combine to produce a portrait of a guy who is so down and out that our first glimpse is a shot of him passed out in his own car while being harassed by snotty neighborhood kids with a dead squirrel. When we meet him he has a pretty simple outlook on life – a mantra, if you will, to start each day: “Nobody likes you. Everybody hates you. You’re gonna lose. Smile you fuck.” Willis, who has made a career out of playing world-weary tough guys, nails the defeated vibe that sticks to Joe like stink on dog poo. Joe’s actually a very disillusioned good guy, an ex-Secret Service agent who saved the President’s life once but got fired after he punched out a senator (Chelcie Ross) with a kinky streak. Throughout the movie, Willis delivers deadpanned one-liners while constantly getting the crap kicked out him. As a result, you can't help but root for him as he and Wayans send the baddies to their well-deserved violent deaths.

Willis plays a classic burn-out, sporting the traditional slovenly appearance of a down-on-his-luck P.I. complete with unshaven look and rumpled clothes that he slept in. And that’s the best he looks, from that point on it’s all downhill as his face takes on cuts and lacerations accrued from fighting numerous bad guys. Joe actually uses his disheveled appearance to his advantage, like when a random baddie takes him into an alleyway to kill him. Joe buys time by cracking jokes about the flunkie’s wife and then, when the guy lets his guard down, stabs him in the throat with broken bottle. The guy gurgles, “You bastard,” to which Joe curtly replies, “And then some.” Willis was born to spout Black’s dialogue. He’s the master of sarcastic comebacks and gets some real doozies in The Last Boy Scout. At one point, Jimmy chides him, “You read much?” Joe replies, “My subscription to Juggs magazine just ran out.”

Jimmy is also at an emotional cul-de-sac of sorts – popping pills to stave off chronic pain from football injuries he picked up as a player. Like Joe, he’s been disgraced from his former profession, kicked out of the league for gambling. He now spends time feeling sorry for himself by cultivating a drinking problem and nailing anything in a skirt despite having a super-hot stripper girlfriend played by Halle Berry (only in the movies!). Like Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, Jimmy lost his family to tragedy and it taints his entire worldview. Life means nothing and solving his girlfriend’s murder is the only thing he has left. Wayans shows that he’s more than just a goofy funnyman in a scene where he tells Joe how he got kicked out of football. It is an angry tirade tinged with hurt and bitter resentment as he was basically chewed up and spit out by an uncaring organization. His speech touches upon the harsh realties of professional sports.

Scott populates his film with a fine collection of character actors, chief among them Noble Willingham as uber rich football team owner Sheldon Marcone and stand-up comedian Taylor Negron cast wonderfully against type as one of Black’s trademark polite, well-spoken sociopaths (see also Lethal Weapon’s Mr. Joshua and The Long Kiss Goodnight’s Timothy). Marcone is also a repeating motif in Black’s scripts. He’s an old, privileged white man who is greedy and corrupt. Think of the money-laundering retired general in Lethal Weapon and the war-mongering CIA boss in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Black clearly sees these men as the source of real evil in the world, pulling the strings that will result in death and destruction in the name of money. In all three films, the protagonists face insurmountable odds to do what is right regardless of the danger or risk to their own well-being.

Like most buddy action movies, the relationship between Joe and Jimmy starts off with plenty of friction as the quarterback resents the private investigator watching over his girlfriend because that’s his job. They trade a few insults and then decide to team up when she’s killed. Black has fun playing around with the dynamic between two guys who basically hate each other but are thrown together due to extraordinary circumstances. At one point, Jimmy cracks a joke to lighten the mood between them only to be rebuffed by Joe. Jimmy tells him, “I’m just trying to break the ice,” to which Joe replies, “I like ice. Leave it the fuck alone.” There are all kinds of snappy banter between them as Wayans tones down his trademark goofy shtick and more or less plays straight man to Willis’ deadpan humor.

Unlike a lot of buddy action movies, Black allows for the occasional lull, like the moment where Jimmy looks at a photograph of him and Cory and you can see on his face how upset he is by her death now that he has a moment to reflect on it. No words are said, Wayans’ face says it all. Joe and Jimmy represent the last bastion of decency in a world that is corrupt and morally bankrupt, where best friends double cross each other, wealthy businessmen are blackmailed, and wives cheat on their husbands. The deeper our two heroes go into investigating Cory’s murder the more corruption they uncover.

The aforementioned alleyway sequence and Cory’s death are vintage Tony Scott moments with his trademark look: smoke, neon and rainy streets at night. Think of it as the director’s version of a neo-noir. He is equally adept at action sequences as he is with showdown set pieces, like the scene where a henchman repeatedly offers Joe a cigarette only to punch it out of his mouth. Joe has been captured and is unarmed and outnumbered but he still has the balls to threaten to kill the guy if he hits him one more time. There is palpable tension as we wait for Joe to follow through on his threat (or be killed), which he does with brutal swiftness. It is reminiscent of the famous showdown between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance (1993) where a tense scene could erupt in violence at any moment.

Successful screenwriter Shane Black made headlines in 1989 when he sold his spec screenplay (written without a contract from a studio or a producer) for The Last Boy Scout to the David Geffen Co. for an unprecedented $1.75 million. He had wisely taken advantage of the boom of independent production companies that sprouted up in the late 1980s looking for big budget action scripts. It must’ve come as validation of his abilities after what he had been through.

After his meteoric rise with the success of the script he had written for Lethal Weapon, a sequel was inevitable. The studio gave Black first crack at it. Something had happened to the writer after enjoying a taste of notoriety and his first draft was even darker than what he had written for the first Lethal Weapon. For starters, he proceeded to kill off Mel Gibson’s character. Not surprisingly, the studio didn’t want to go that route and Black quit the project. Then, he lost the desire to write. A family illness coupled with the break-up of a long-term relationship rocked his already shaky confidence. For the next two years he did no writing and instead lived in fear of the next project and failing. Out of this dark period in his life came the script for The Last Boy Scout, which he wrote in five months.

For the script, Black drew on such influences as hard-boiled crime fiction by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald because they wrote about “personal integrity, morality, conflict, dealing with insanity, dealing with pain and death.” He wanted to write a modern private investigator story set in Los Angeles. He decided to set his story with the sleazy side of professional football as the backdrop because it matched up well with his take on a Chandleresque private investigator story. For Black, football “combines the spirit of the American hero with the spirit of American greed.” After finishing the script, he didn’t think it would sell because “it was weird” and “too rough for most people. It’s not a commercial formula; it’s a very raunchy, down and dirty detective film.”

Originally, director Tony Scott had a war movie taking place in Afghanistan set up as his follow-up to the Tom Cruise racing car movie Days of Thunder (1990). However, the script didn’t come together and he was given The Last Boy Scout. He liked it so much that he agreed to do it. Not much has come out of what went down during filming but what little has suggests a contentious shoot. With titanic egos like producer Joel Silver, movie star Bruce Willis and Tony Scott, they were bound to clash and they did as Scott later admitted, “I got caught a little bit between Bruce and Joel Silver … I was pushed in terms of the cast and in terms of how I was shooting it.” He also felt that Black’s script “was better than the final movie.” Of the experience, all Silver would say was that it was “one of the three worst experiences in my life.”

Not surprisingly, The Last Boy Scout received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and called it “a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart, utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller. How is the critic to respond? To give it a negative review would be dishonest, because it is such a skillful and well-crafted movie.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Willis’ performance: “Like Bogart, he plugs you right into his cynicism — then, in the middle of the most untenable situation (say, when a grinning thug keeps socking him in the jaw instead of lighting his cigarette), he'll drop a soft-voiced, grace-under-pressure remark that detonates like a neutron bomb,” and called the film “a guilty pleasure by any standard, but I've seen plenty of guilt-free movies lately that aren't this much fun.”

However, in his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time.” The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Wilmington called it “a dirty-mouth Walter Mitty fantasy, product of an age where naiveté and cynicism are locked in promiscuous embrace. It's also macho daydreaming with a vengeance.”  In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized the film’s view of women: “In this cast of dumbly conceived archetypes, the worst is Willis's teenage daughter (Danielle Harris). She doesn't talk just dirty. Large sods of earth roll from her tongue. In Scout, if a woman isn't a slut or a bimbo, she's a bitch.”

The Last Boy Scout performed fairly well at the box office and has since enjoyed a second life on video and television (thank you, TBS). Black went on to get paid more than $1 million for his rewrites on The Last Action Hero (1993), a criminally underrated romp that is the granddaddy of self-reflexive action movies. This movie was crucified by critics and did not perform as well at the box office as expected but this did not tarnish Black’s reputation either. However, he disappeared from movies for a few years before coming back with a vengeance with the quirky private detective movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and is currently working on Iron Man 3 (2013). The Last Boy Scout is a lean, mean guilty pleasure with a misanthropic streak that is uncompromisingly un-PC in attitude. This is further reinforced by its rather poor view of women. They are either liars and cheats (Joe’s wife), whores (Cory), or foul-mouthed brats (Joe’s daughter). Joe takes it all grimly in stride because hey, he’s already hit rock bottom. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything, including himself. Action films don't get any nastier than this one.

SOURCES

Greenberg, James. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Millionaire.” Los Angeles Magazine. August 19, 1990.

The Last Boy Scout Production Notes. 1991.

“Tony Scott on Tony Scott.” Empire.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. “Tony Scott’s Project.” The New York Times. July 12, 1991.

Domino

Tony Scott has had a wildly uneven yet fascinating career that has seen him dabble in art house horror (The Hunger), jingoistic propaganda (Top Gun), and the buddy action film (The Last Boy Scout). He has always lived in the shadow of his older brother, Ridley, who makes epic, prestige films with A-list movie stars. Tony, on the other hand, has a more B-movie sensibility but is able to realize his films with large budgets and marquee names like Kevin Costner, Brad Pitt, and Denzel Washington. The studios like him because of the talent he attracts and his films consistently make money. In the 2000’s, he reinvented the look of his films with Man on Fire (2004) in an attempt to stay relevant with younger audiences with limited attention spans and raised on music videos, but risked alienating fans of his past films. The result was an intensely fractured editing style that propelled action thrillers like Domino (2005) and Déjà Vu (2006). It got to the point where this hyperactive editing began to distract from the narratives of his films. However, with Domino this approach oddly enough works because the film’s style attempts to approximate its protagonist’s stream of consciousness. After all, she narrates her own story and so most of the film is told from her point-of-view.


Film director John Ford famously said, "When forced to pick between truth and legend, print the legend." This certainly applies to Scott’s biopic about the life of Domino Harvey, daughter of actor Laurence Harvey and supermodel Paulene Stone. Her father died when she was four-years-old and was unable to fill the void by his passing. By her teens, she had been kicked out of four elite boarding schools. At 20, she moved to Los Angeles and lived with her mother in the Hollywood Hills. She went into rehab for a drug addiction that started in her teens. Soon after, she reinvented herself and tried her hand at being a ranch hand in San Diego and a volunteer firefighter. From there, she ran a London dance club and even gave up a promising career as a model to become a bounty hunter, partnering with Ed Martinez. She helped him capture 50 fugitives and, in the process, also renewed her drug habit.

You couldn’t have created a better story and Scott and screenwriter Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) run with it, assembling a balls-out attack on the notion of celebrity that is part satire and part action film. Think of it as Scott’s Natural Born Killers (1994). Like Oliver Stone’s film, Scott throws all kinds of disparate elements into a stylish blender and what comes out is an intriguing mess of a film. Domino was blasted by critics and flopped at the box office but one has to admire the casting radically against type of Keira Knightley as Domino. She delivers one of the strongest performances of her career and is supported by Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez, a veteran actor and up-and-coming one. In turn, they are surrounded by an eclectic cast to say the least – Lucy Liu, Tom Waits, and Christopher Walken, along with Beverly Hills 90210 alumni Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green playing themselves (sort of).

The film begins with Domino (Keira Knightley) in police custody and being questioned by a criminal psychologist (Lucy Liu in an annoying cameo) and then proceeds to tell her story, about how she gave up her pampered, Beverly Hills 90210 life for that of an ass-kicking bounty hunter, through a series of flashbacks. Her father died when Domino was very young and she vowed to never let anyone get close to her again. She dabbled in modeling as Britain’s answer to Gia Carangi before her mother moved to L.A. and tried to mould her into a Beverly Hills socialite a la Paris Hilton, but Domino rebelled. These early scenes do a good job of selling Keira Knightley’s badass credentials and show how Domino got into bounty hunting. She went to a seminar and met Ed Mosbey (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), two miscreants who take off with the participants’ money. Impressed by her chutzpah, Ed agrees to take her on and show her the ropes despite Choco’s reservations. Knightley, Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez play well off each other as she acts as the petulant younger sister to their older brothers – Ramirez, the macho man of few words and Rourke, the grizzled veteran with a swagger in his step.

Domino has a wicked sense of humor and this apparent in a scene that gleefully satirizes daytime talks shows by having Mo’Nique’s DMV worker go on Jerry Springer with her system of identifying mixed races entitled, the Mixed Race Categorical Flow Chart. For example, she identifies herself as Blactino (black and Latino) and then labels an audience member Chinegro (Chinese and black). This scene takes the circus-like atmosphere of Springer’s show and cranks it up another notch so that it rivals the sitcom parody in Natural Born Killers for zeroing in on one of the most ridiculous aspects of popular culture. And speaking of sending up pop culture, you have to give Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green credit for being willing to laugh at themselves in this film as they play exaggerated versions of their public personas. Scott puts their “characters” through the wringer as he pokes fun at spoiled, washed-up T.V. stars. Scott felt that the film’s story was made up of two halves: Domino’s life up to and including her decision to become a bounty hunter and her stint on a reality T.V. show. He wanted to have comedic elements in the film and the second half with Ziering and Green gave him plenty of opportunities.

All of the people around Domino want something – a book deal, money, T.V. ratings, or to boost their Hollywood reputation – but she’s not interested in any of that. The film suggests that becoming a bounty hunter was a way of rejecting her family’s privileged lifestyle. She wanted to throw that all away and do something that involved honest, hard work but even that gets corrupted when she, Ed and Choco inadvertently get roped into going after four thieves who may or may not have robbed an armored truck containing money belonging Drake Bishop (Dabney Coleman), the billionaire owner of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and who has links to mafia boss Anthony Cigliutti (Stanley Kamel). In a nice nod to the bank robbers masquerading as ex-Presidents of the United States in Point Break (1991), the armored truck robbers disguise themselves as several of the First Ladies. Eventually, our anti-heroes find themselves in a Mexican standoff reminiscent of the ones in past Scott films, True Romance (1993) and Enemy of the State (1998).

If Domino is the cinematic equivalent of an acid trip then the desert sequence is its peak. After inadvertently drinking Mescaline-dosed coffee, Domino and her crew (including her driver) crash their RV in the desert. Bruised and bloodied, Domino, Ed and Choco crawl out of the wreckage zonked out of their minds and are soon visited by none other than Tom Waits as the strains of his song, “Jesus Gonna Be Here” plays on the film’s soundtrack. He calls Domino an “angel of fire” and tells her that she and her companions must sacrifice their lives so that a young child may live. Waits’ character is clearly intended to be a holy man of some sort, a shaman putting the protagonists on a righteous path and proceeds to literally drive them to their destiny. Scott saw Waits’ character as a kind of Greek chorus that apparently has some kind of psychic connection with Domino and left it ambiguous if he was real or a figment of her imagination.

Knightley’s Domino is a fascinating package: a tough, gun-toting bounty hunter who also uses her stunning looks to get what she wants, like giving a gangbanger a lap dance to get the location of a guy she’s after. While that scene shows off her body, Scott turns it around in the next one, showing Domino watching Choco strip down to his underwear in a laundromat. He lingers just as long on Ramirez’s fine, chiseled physique so there’s eye candy for everyone. Knightley’s performance in Domino almost makes you forget how she was wasted in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. The actress’ natural beauty and British heritage make her an excellent, if not unconventional, choice to play a model turned bounty hunter. The big question was if should could convey the toughness required for the role and not look ridiculous holding a gun. Thanks to Scott’s stylized camerawork, Knightley certainly looks the part and her performance does the rest. This film, along with her role in The Jacket (2005), are among her strongest performances to date. Both are vastly underappreciated and amply demonstrate that she’s more than a pretty face – she as some actual acting chops if given the chance to use them.

Christopher Walken plays Mark Weiss, an energetic public relations man with an “attention span of a ferret on crystal meth,” as one character puts it, and is played with the actor’s customary gusto. It’s great to see Walken taking a break from forgettable fare that has plagued his career for years and appearing in a high profile film such as this one. His glad-handing vulture evokes Robert Downey Jr.’s vain tabloid journalist in Natural Born Killers and is nearly as entertaining. Like Mickey Rourke, Walken has done a lot of bad fllms in recent memory but his performance in Domino is one of the best he’s done in the last ten years.

The slapdash, fast and loose style of Scott’s actually works in Domino – the director messes around with the speed of the film, the color intensity and amps up the music during montage sequences in order to draw our attention to them because he is imparting crucial information. He tarts up the color of the film to garish levels that include sun-baked yellows, Palmolive liquid green and midnight blues. In doing so, Scott calls attention to the artificiality of his film. There is very little resemblance of reality in Domino and instead it resembles a fevered dream that resides in Domino’s head. Domino is densely edited with layers of images that hit us at an accelerated rate. Along with Natural Born Killers, Domino must hold the record for most insert shots in a film. In NBK, Mickey and Mallory Knox became anti-folk heroes as does Domino, Ed and Choco to the sleaze addicts in the world who watch reality shows just like the people who idolize serial killers in Oliver Stone’s film. Furthermore, there is a scene in Domino where her goldfish dies and like Mickey killing the Native American Indian, this is a pivotal turning point when things begin to go south for her.

Director Tony Scott first heard of Domino Harvey in the mid-1990’s when his business manager sent him an article about her. What really got Scott’s attention was her being actor Laurence Harvey’s daughter and that she came from a very privileged life only to turn her back on it. He immediately contacted Domino and invited her to his office. A week later, they were in discussions to make her story into a film. From the get-go, he was not interested in making a standard biopic about her life. Over the years, Scott befriended Domino and she became a surrogate daughter to him. He tried to warn her to be careful but she told him that she loved the adrenaline rush that came with the job. He also met her bounty hunting team and witnessed their dynamic together. Scott began taping interviews with her and they provided the basis of a screenplay. In 1995, she sold her life story to him for $260,000.

Scott had several screenwriters (including, reportedly, Roger Avary) attempt to adapt her life into a film but found that they were all much too straightforward for his liking. Scott saw Donnie Darko (2001), written and directed by Richard Kelly, and then read his script for Southland Tales (2007) and was taken with his “unusual and very imaginative approach in terms of his comedic elements and his darker, almost sci-fi side,” while also creating characters that were “real, breathing people.” Kelly came up with the genesis for his fictionalized take on Domino’s life while sitting at a Santa Monica Department of Motor Vehicles trying to correct an error with his driver’s license. He saw the place as a source of vast information and decided to use it as the center of each story within the film. Much like he did with Southland Tales, Kelly crafted a complex narrative that interweaved several stories with flashbacks and flashforwards. Scott described it as “a huge jigsaw puzzle. The audience has to pay attention in order to stay with all the beats of the story.”

Kelly envisioned the telling of Domino’s story as if it was a fevered dream, “a fabrication or as a satire, kind of,” and to tell it in the style of Rashomon (1950). When he interviewed the real Domino for two hours, she told him about going to summer school at Beverly Hills High and from that he wrote in the Beverly Hills 90210 aspects. He had grown up with the show and felt that “it was a lightning rod for the way teenagers were supposed to behave in the After School Special meets Rodeo Drive soap opera quality of that show.” To that end, two of its cast members – Green and Ziering came on board playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

When Scott was ready to make the film, he contacted long-time friend and producer Samuel Hadida. They had worked together previously on True Romance with Samuel’s brother Victor, but it was not a commercial hit. This did not deter the Hadida brothers from taking a gamble on Scott’s new unconventional project. They gave the director the creative freedom to make the film the way he wanted. In 2002, Samuel met Kelly while the filmmaker was distributing Donnie Darko and he told the producer that he was writing the script for Domino. A few years later, Scott contacted Hadida and told him that he was trying to get the film made and had a small window of opportunity because actress Keira Knightley was only available from October to December.

The next day, Scott sent Hadida the script and a video of several clips from past films, commercials and television shows to give an idea of the look and tone he envisioned for Domino. He also sent a copy of Man on Fire and the next day Hadida agreed to finance the new film. The producer liked Kelly’s script with its dark humor and that “it was emotional and took you for a ride, but the character was still believable and three-dimensional.” The Hadidas sent the script to New Line Cinema, a company with a reputation for making challenging films, and they were interested in working with Scott and Knightley, the latter who was coming off the very popular Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), which is where Scott first noticed her. He cast the then-20-year-old Knightley based on instinct. He felt that transforming the actress into Domino would be like the real Domino transforming herself into a bounty hunter.

In April 2004, she met Scott in Los Angeles and told him how much she loved the script with its “mad story. It’s got action, sexuality, violence, bad language … but it’s very funny.” She was excited at the chance “to do something a little crazy that I hadn’t done before.” The actress wasn’t interested in doing an imitation of Domino and Kelly’s highly fictionalized take helped in her approach to the role. Knightley actually met the real Domino a couple of times while filming Pride & Prejudice (2005). Knightley didn’t have enough prep time to study her and so Scott told the actress to make up her own character. So, Knightley based her performance on her best friend and taped interviews of the real Domino. During the last two weeks of filming Pride & Prejudice, Knightley was getting calls from Scott about costumes and other things to do with Domino and remembered, “I couldn’t get my head into it at all,” and this upset the actress because she never had this problem before. She decided to cut off most of her hair and physically rid herself of the previous film role.

Scott had known Mickey Rourke socially for years and felt that the actor shared a similar personality with the real Ed: “Mickey is the right age, he’s grown up on motorcycles and in a boxing ring.” Without hesitation, Rourke agreed to do the film. For the actor, the script didn’t come to life until he started working on it with Scott, Knightley and Ramirez. During principal photography, Rourke constantly refined his character and wanted to know more details of Ed’s backstory. In 2004, Edgar Ramirez introduced a screening of his film, Punto Y Raya (2004) to the Hollywood Foreign Press in L.A. Casting director Denise Chamian was there and suggested that Scott and Hadida meet with the actor. After doing so and conducting a screen test, the director cast him as Choco, the hot-blooded Latino bounty hunter.

For the bounty hunter details, Scott hired Zeke Unger, a 20-year bounty hunting veteran as the film’s technical adviser. He was involved during principal photography but also offered his expertise to Kelly and the three lead actors, putting them through a brief training program. Knightley had only come from her last film, Pride & Prejudice, four days before and started a two-day boot camp with Ramirez while also studying Kelly’s script, breaking it down and annotating the entire thing. Unger and his crew taught the actors about bail bonds, laws, self-defense, basic handling of firearms, marksmanship, and so on.

Filming began on October 4, 2004 in and around the L.A. area. In early December, the production moved to Las Vegas for a final total of 62 days. The pace was fast, mirroring that of the film itself, and, of course, to accommodate Knightley’s small window of availability. For the look of Domino, Scott wanted a color palette that was “all over the place,” including some shots in black and white. He wanted a “gritty, heightened reality” via brighter colors, darker blacks and whiter whites. The color palette often varied depending on the emotion of the individual scene. Scott utilized both 35mm and HD video cameras in the style of what he had done on Man on Fire. Scott also relied on multiple sources of inspiration, including magazines, newspapers, books, and magazines – building a reference library for his crew to draw from. He used frenetic camera movement and different film stocks to mirror what he described as the “21st century mindset” of the script, according to the film’s cinematographer Dan Mindel. To achieve the kinetic feel Scott wanted, Mindel employed hand crank cameras to shoot multiple exposures, which gave a distinctive look that came from varying exposures due to the inaccuracy of the camera speed. Many scenes utilized four to six cameras at a time in order to cut down on the number of takes the actors would have to do and to avoid having to go back for more coverage or inserts.

While Scott’s film was being made, the real Domino faced federal drug trafficking charges and a possible ten-year prison term. She was convinced that she had been set up. She told her former bounty hunting partner Ed Martinez that she wanted to make a documentary about her life in response to the highly fictionalized Scott film. She had been on the film set often, appearing briefly on-screen at the end, and even acted as a technical consultant. It was widely reported in the British press that according to an anonymous friend and her mother she was not pleased with how she was portrayed as purely heterosexual when she wasn’t and the liberties Kelly’s script took with her life. However, friends and family claim that she was happy with it. Domino died of a drug overdose on June 27, 2005. According to Scott, Domino never got to see the finished film but did see parts of it and loved what she saw.

Domino was very nearly universally despised by critics. In her review for the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday felt that the film was “occasionally funny and visually arresting, amount to absolutely nothing.” USA Today gave the film one-and-a-half out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “You can't accuse this film of bogging down in cheap psychology, yet you come out dissatisfied and without a clue about what made this person tick.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Is a movie that works as hard to be badass as Domino does a contradiction in terms? As a packaged sensory onslaught of girl-gunslinger nihilism, Scott's film would seem to have everything, yet taken simply as entertainment, it is dreadful: less cool than ice-cold, its violence too dissociated to inspire a decadent tremor of excitement.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Of course, if you care about things like logic and coherence, you probably shouldn't be watching Domino in the first place. Its director, the flamboyant Tony Scott, says, ‘This movie is about heightened reality,’ which means it's a chance for him to blow things up, employ a lot of stunt people and fool around with a variety of film stocks and processing techniques.”

Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who gave it a favorable review with a three star rating: “Did I admire Domino? In a sneaky way, yes. It's fractured and maddening, but it's alive. It begins with the materials of a perfectly conventional thriller. It heeds Godard's rule that ‘all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.’” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis also gave the film a positive review: “What makes Domino the ultimate Tony Scott movie - or as a friend put it, ‘It's all the Tony Scott you could possibly want in a Tony Scott movie!’ - is its uncharacteristically sharp screenplay. Mr. Scott has worked with talented writers before, but this is the first time he has shot a film written by a screenwriter who both cops to the great enjoyment that can be had from the modern action movie - perhaps best illustrated here by the sight of Ms. Knightley unloading two machine guns at once - and blows the action-movie tropes to smithereens.”

Ultimately, it’s not important how much of Domino is true and how much of it isn’t. That’s really not the point that Scott is trying to make. This film may be his most personal one yet because of his close friendship with its subject. Coming from that perspective, he wasn’t interested in showing the more sordid side of her life – namely the raging drug habit, the going in and out of rehab, and so on – but rather he wanted this film to pay tribute to his friend by emphasizing the attributes he admired in her. One has to marvel at the chutzpah and clout Scott used to take a big chunk of someone else’s money and make a heartfelt tribute that was hated by most film critics and also bombed at the box office. Now that the dust has settled and some time has passed, Domino really needs to be re-evaluated and rediscovered for the wildly entertaining and oddly moving film that it is.

SOURCES

Domino Production Notes. 2005.

Edemariam, Aida. “She Loved Bringing in Sleazebags.” The Guardian. June 20, 2005.

“Interview: Keira Knightley & Tony Scott.” IGN. October 12, 2005.

Lee, Chris. “The Fall of a Thrill Hunter.” The Times. July 22, 2005.

Murray, Rebecca. “Richard Kelly Discusses Domino, Working with Tony Scott & Southland Tales.” About.com. August 20, 2005.