“How’d you know?”
“We’re americans, we read your emails.”

I’ve been consistently behind on the movie blog all year. The worst gap was caused by the China tip, delaying my True/False posts by months and necessitating a 12-feature catchup post. Slowly getting better now – I watched Domino only three weeks ago – but I’ve completely forgotten it already, a near-total waste of a movie.

Fortunately, I took notes and screenshots. We’ve got two bantery cops answering a call, and the suspect Eriq Ebouaney (star of Lumumba and A Season in France) kills white-haired Søren Malling (of Borgen) and gets away with the help of the CIA, leaving fuckup cop Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (of Mama) suspectless and partnerless and in trouble with his bosses.

Nikolaj with dying Søren and S’s wife Paprika Steen (of a couple Ira Sachs movies):

This is a De Palma movie, but reportedly a troubled one. Some nice slow zooms and his notorious diopters add some flavor, but there’s only so much they can do. The sound design seems off, like the actors are on a stage and the music comes in all huge and intrusive… it looks stagy too, in the ill-advised Eriq/Nikolaj tile-rooftop chase scene, but not necessarily stagy in a bad way, just colorfully artificial. It’s ultimately the kind of international thriller bullshit that’s always vaguely satisfying but is incredibly hard to make great, unless it’s a Mission: Impossible or you are Michael Mann. At least it’s clean looking, with no apparent Bourne influence.

Søren and Eriq:

Anyway, Black Book star Carice van Houten is on the case with Nikolaj… while Guy Pearce wants Eriq to collaborate with the CIA since they have a common enemy, and he’s kidnapped Eriq’s son as insurance… and that common enemy sends a split-screen live-cam suicide bomber to commit mass murder at a film festival, ugh.

Adam Nayman on this scene:

Complicating matters further is the fact that Domino‘s most unforgettable moment — its most conspicuous flexing of directorial muscles, as well as the bit that nods to The Fury — may also be its most unforgivable … In the same way that the camera lens becomes aligned with the sniper scope, De Palma’s grotesque showmanship doubles as an act of self-reflexive commentary on the spectacle of both onscreen and real-life violence, plus the maybe-cathartic implications of visualizing a literal attack on an industry that’s stopped returning his calls.

The movie has a very saggy middle – who cares about Carice’s affair with the dead cop (illustrated with hilariously photoshopped vacation photos on her phone). While Eriq is on his revenge spree, tossing a dude out a window and boiling a cafe owner’s head, Carice makes an incredible logic leap, follows a tomato truck and finds the Big Bad (Mohammed Azaay of Layla M) in time to thwart a sporting-event terror attack by slicing the would-be killer with a quadcopter. The white guys fight over who gets to keep Eriq then Carice shows up and immediately shoots him, haha.