Director Brian de Palma
de Palma with actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
de Palma with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and actress Carice van Houten
DOMINO D
Denmark France Italy
Belgium Netherlands (89 mi) 2019 d:
Brian de Palma
Kind of a throwback film from an earlier era, feeding into
the global paranoia about Islamic terrorism, like the cheapo exploitation
flicks pumped out by your typical Golan-Globus production, founded by Israeli
cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, which in the mid-80’s were cranking out
more than a dozen films per year, coinciding with the VHS boom of the late 70’s
and early 80’s, literally packing the shelves of local video stores, when the
company had an insatiable appetite for high octane B-movies, where the secret
was their embrace of the international market, something Hollywood was slow to
comprehend. Enter Brian de Palma, a
shlock movie specialist with an affinity for films from that era, where this is
only his second film in more than a decade, seemingly making this film on the
fly. Shot in Spain and Denmark with an
international cast and crew, it couldn’t be more confusing, spoken in English
instead of Danish, where the sound’s not in synch with the words being spoken,
feeling like it was hastily completed.
As it turns out, de Palma had an additional hour that has been excised
from the final version, with the release delayed for a year, with the director
removed from the final product.
Completely frustrated with the process, de Palma is quoted a year ago as
saying, “I had a lot of problems in financing [the film]. I never experienced such a horrible movie
set. A large part of our team has not
even been paid yet by the Danish producers.
The film is finished and ready to go out, but I have no idea what its future
will hold, it is currently in the hands of the producers. This was my first experience in Denmark and
most likely my last.” Rife with
stereotypes, exactly like all his earlier films, this is not exactly a picture
of taste and refinement, using crude exploitive imagery that is not for the
meek, revitalizing ISIS beheadings and suicide bombers, creating propaganda
imagery as recruiting material, which this film is more than happy to recreate,
emulating their style, suggesting de Palma actually finds cinematic aspects of
ISIS propaganda intriguing, perhaps admiring the way (befitting of the age of
selfies) terrorists love to document their own atrocities, using a lead
character to speak the director’s mind, “Even the way they shoot it, it's like
they're professionals. I mean, the use
of graphics, slow-motion, even a drone shot.” If that’s not disgusting enough, less of an
action thriller, this is really a threadbare romance taking place in a murky
world of international terrorism, though there’s barely a pulse that registers,
as the man in question is actually dead, killed off early in the film, yet the
pangs of love survive. There’s something
silly and passé about the storyline, like recalling a bad dream, but it doesn’t
have to make sense, though it’s an attempt to be topical.
Set in Denmark, with a pan of the sleek architecture of
Copenhagen reminding viewers where they are, we follow a pair of hard-nosed
cops, the more flamboyant Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and the older,
internally repressed Lars (Søren Malling), who seems lost on a different
wavelength, cynical and downbeat, as if uncomfortable in his own skin. While Christian obsesses about food and sex,
Lars is moody and inherently disinterested all the time, though he’s punctual,
picking up his partner the next morning, but his female sex partner in bed
doesn’t want to let him go, allowing himself to get distracted, actually
forgetting his gun, an act for which consequences invariably ensue. Responding to a routine call, described as a
domestic dispute (altogether missing a van parked out front in plain view), they
encounter a man on the elevator with blood on the tips of his shoes, Ezra
Tarzi, Eriq Ebouaney, never better than portraying Patrice Lumumba in LUMUMBA
(2000), also appearing in de Palma’s own FEMME FATALE (2002), but here he goes
through the motions as the angry black man, arrested on the spot, handcuffed
and apprehended, with Christian borrowing his partner’s gun to take a look
upstairs while Lars awaits a patrol van to take their prisoner. What he discovers is revolting, as Tarzi has
been torturing a victim with a knife, but by the time he runs back downstairs,
Tarzi has escaped the cuffs and stabbed his partner in the neck (without his
gun to defend himself), making a break out the window onto the roof. Unsure of what to do, but at the urging of his
partner, he bolts out the window giving chase, where the steepness of the roof
gives each of them problems, with both perilously hanging from a dangling
gutter overlooking the street down below in an homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958), eventually falling into a crate of tomatoes. While Christian is momentarily dazed, men in
suits apprehend Tarzi, taking him away, leaving Christian to ponder what just
happened. But this sets the wheels in
motion, as Lars lies unconscious in a hospital bed while Christian unravels the
dark past of Tarzi, a former special forces Libyan whose patriotic father was
beheaded by a terrorist mastermind Salah al-Din (Mohammed Azaay), who as it
turns out spent 12 years in Guantánamo as a model prisoner without incident,
but literally hours after his release he goes underground completely
undetected, currently seen prepping a young female suicide bomber on her next
mission, which will send fear into the hearts of the West while bringing glory
to God and Islam (“Ending the lives of infidels is a great thing. Scaring the millions of others who see it
live on TV is something even greater!”), with de Palma in split screen capturing
the face of the assassin mixed with the horrified faces of the victims as she
machine guns actors, models, and photographers on the red carpet runway of the
Netherlands Film Festival (an homage to his own film Femme Fatale shot on the Cannes red carpet), causing sheer
pandemonium, but also utter jubilation when viewed from al-Din’s
perspective.
With underwritten characters that never come alive and a
tepid orchestral score that falls flat, this borders on the banal, where easily
the silliest thread in the film is the portrayal of the CIA, given comical
stature from none other than Guy Pearce (in a bad accent) playing Agent Joe
Martin, who has no redeeming moral values, so corrupt that he may as well be a
criminal himself, essentially blackmailing Tarzi, who he kidnaps at the crime scene
(while imprisoning his children), to do the dirty work that the CIA is
hamstrung to do due to legal restraints, basically encouraging Tarzi to be a
mad dog on the loose, operating with impunity, free to torture, murder, or
rough up potential suspects as he pleases, hell-bent on revenge for the death
of his father, ferociously targeting al-Din, with Agent Martin sitting on the
sidelines casually taking credit for it all.
Meanwhile Christian joins forces with the detective assigned to
investigate the case, Alex (Carice van Houten), who has a secret romantic
history with his partner, a revelation that leaves Christian completely
flummoxed, incapable of believing his partner kept secrets from him, but may
explain his reticent behavior of late.
This romantic storyline is simply Hollywood overkill, as they love to
express romance in the backdrop of war or some other tragic event, supposedly
accentuating the power of love, but since Lars dies in the hospital while
Christian and Alex are on the road in search of Tarzi, there is no love affair
to speak of, as it all happened in a hermetically sealed universe, becoming
more of a memorial tribute. With all
events converging in Almería, Spain, we discover a tomato motif used throughout
the film is the means for weapons trafficking, smuggled while concealed in
tomato crates onto ferries crossing the sea into Morocco, easily transporting
weapons into Libya or Mali or the sites of other ISIS uprisings. If it weren’t so comically simplistic,
especially the coincidence of recognizing the terrorist leader in the front
seat of a produce truck, following him to a bullring in the center of town
where another planned attack is to take place, which must have lured de Palma,
known for creating dynamic set pieces in real life locations, but this one kind
of fizzles out instead. Apparently they
had funding difficulties, unable to find extras to fill the stadium to
capacity, so the shot never materialized as intended. Nonetheless, there are few memorable movie
scenes shot in bullrings, so this has an air of anticipation, with all the
forces converging at one dramatic point in time, a powderkeg about to explode,
with de Palma mixing a modern era drone viewpoint with old-fashioned binocular
shots, but few will likely find this resolution appealing, reduced to a
one-liner from Agent Martin, explaining how he figured out what was going on,
“We’re Americans, we read your emails.”
In the end, however, international terrorism has been reduced to a personal
revenge saga, bathed in an unseen romance, with plenty of revolting propaganda
footage taking center stage.
