Domino

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. 

Mad Max: Fury Road

MAD MAX:  FURY ROAD               C+                

Australia  USA  (120 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  George Miller               Official site

If you like adrenaline-laced Hollywood action adventures, then this is the movie for you, as it’s really all about a series of lengthy chase scenes, each one attempting to create blood-curdling moments of action and suspense, followed by a few moments of down time where the viewers can catch their breath, before the next one starts up again.  It’s a bit like kids waiting in line at Disneyland before taking a ride on one of the more spectacular roller coaster adventures of their young lives, where spending all day at this could resemble the feel of this movie.  It’s not essential that you’re young, but it actually plays better to those who weren’t around to see the original MAD MAX Trilogy (1979, 81, 85).  To those that were, this is fairly forgettable, as you’ve seen it all before, where this is kind of a combination of films two and three reassembled into a director’s cut, where director George Miller waited thirty years for technology to catch up to what he likes to do, which is stage elaborately choreographed fast-action fantasy sequences that are pumped and accelerated by the apocalyptic, end-of-the-world setting, making it matter who wins these catastrophic bloodfests filled with crashes and explosions and bodies hurled in every which direction, giving each episode a moralistic twist.  Personally, having seen the originals as they came out, there’s not much to get excited about, as this has all played out before, where in at least one person’s opinion, Mel Gibson’s Max (replaced here by British actor Tom Hardy) remains the essential piece of the puzzle, where the spare minimalism of the initial episode (made for less than half a million yet earning $100 million, holding the Guinness Book of World Records for most profitable film for decades, supplanted by 1999’s BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and then 2007’s PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, which remains the most profitable low-budget movie ever) remains the best for its novelty, daring originality and utter bleakness.  No one had ever seen anything like that before.  While this may be exactly what people in theaters want to see today, where it’s all about thrilling action and explosions on the biggest screen, really it’s just more of the same.  Even the previews before the movie tell the story, as there were four (count ‘em) trailers for Marvel Comic Book action adventure movies, from ANT-MAN to FANTASTIC FOUR to DEADPOOL to BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, not to mention a new STAR WARS Christmas release, where there is a stream of neverending movies just like this coming out of Hollywood for the next gazillion years (DC and Marvel Comic Book Movie Lineup - 2015 to 2020 ...).  The movie industry has apparently invested all their money in exploding action adventures like this, where viewers must pay a premium price to watch it in IMAX or 3D or the biggest and loudest theater experience possible, where what you pay for is more vividly enthralling than the normal experience of watching it in the comforts of your home, as that’s what Hollywood is selling.  That’s the new theatrical experience, where bigger is better.      

Essentially modelled after MAD MAX 2, aka: THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), which offered breathtakingly relentless non-stop action in an era before CGI effects were possible and is considered one of the greatest action movies ever made, topping the list in a recent January 14, 2015 Rolling Stone magazine Reader’s Poll, Readers' Poll: The 10 Best Action Movies of All Time ..., while described by critic Richard Scheib, Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib], as an “exhilarating non-stop rollercoaster ride of a film that contains some of the most exciting stunts and car crashes ever put on screen.”  It is the ultimate demolition derby movie that this fourth film has attempted to surpass―and if you’re judging purely by thrills and spills, perhaps it has.  The question, of course, is what does it matter?  Is this anything more than a summer blockbuster movie?  Does it contain a hint of the poetry from the original Trilogy?  Compare the narrator from MAD MAX 2:   

A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear.  Men began to feed on men.  On the roads it was a white line nightmare.  Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive.  The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice.  And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.  Men like Max.  The warrior Max.  In the roar of an engine, he lost everything.  And became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland.

While a similar narration opens MAD MAX 4, toned down significantly:

My name is Max. My world is fire and blood.

Outside of the first, which has become a prelude for the rest, still connected to the world as it was before whatever apocalyptical disaster occurred, MAD MAX 4 is perhaps the most minimalist of the entire series, where Max himself is not even the center of the action, but has been replaced by a newly introduced character, Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who’s seen as more of a badass than Max, whose replacement by a different actor is simply unthinkable.  It would be like Sergio Leone finding someone to replace Clint Eastwood in his legendary spaghetti westerns.  Some iconic figures are so cemented in the heart of the culture that it’s something you just don’t mess with.  Perhaps as a consequence of the transitory nature of a global economy, nothing is sacred.  But this certainly alters the tone of the movie, where the audience was asked to get inside the head of this lone figure wandering the wasteland, a man who started out with a wife and child, but lost everything, as did everybody else.  What follows is utter savagery, but Max, though loath to admit it, becomes a symbol for what was lost, still holding to a humane streak hidden deep inside that gruff exterior which affects our sympathies and appreciation for him, as he’s driven like no one else.  That’s entirely missing in this 4th episode.  And while he’s present, he appears mentally unstable, having grown closer to the darker side of madness, haunted by recurring flashbacks and psychotic voices in his head of all the people he tried to save and failed in the past, which have the effect of draining his strength and weakening his will to survive, which is and always has been his strongest asset.  Not so here, as we haven’t a clue what drives this man, as we no longer connect him to that same iconic figure.  Does that alter one’s appreciation for the movie?  Perhaps, as Max was like no one else.  Altering his persona removes our interest in the overall scheme of things, unless all we care about are extended chase sequences.  Originally conceived more than a decade ago, the film was ready to shoot, but postponed following the 9/11 attacks, where any number of obstacles since then have prevented the film from being made until now.  While all have been conceived and directed by Australian George Miller, this long interim from the last film has allowed technology to catch up with his grandiose vision, as the key to all these films has been the fantastic visual design of an entirely original universe, like something that might have come out of the mind and imagination of fantasy surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky.  At least partially shot in the Namib Desert of Namibia, South Africa, considered the world’s oldest desert, it is a fitting landscape for the remnants of a post-apocalyptic world, as the world’s devastation is easily understandable without ever having to resort to any extraneous talk about how we destroyed ourselves. 

Exactly like MAD MAX 2, the action centers around a daring ride in a tanker truck to help save what’s left of any civilized world, but in something of a twist, Max is not the one driving the truck.  Instead he’s imprisoned by a marauding gang of thugs that control a territory built into the cavernous regions of a giant rock formation known as the Citadel, where they have tapped into an underground water supply and built a structured male-dominated society based on servitude, controlled by the tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a hulking mass of a man that resembles the primitive crudeness of early gladiators.  While it’s essential that each of the imaginary worlds created for each film have a distinctly different look, this one is equally outrageous, with oversized women with massive breasts who are hooked up to machines for their milk, but also an army of captive blood donors whose blood is used to keep others alive, many of whom are suffering from cancerous tumors.  After his capture, Max is kept in chains as a “blood bag,” hooked up like an IV to one of the young “War Boys” named Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who dreams of pleasing Joe with his valor in the field of battle, where Joe promises an afterlife in Valhalla if they die in combat.  Nux uses Max as a hood ornament for one of their gas runs into a nearby city in the wasteland, while Joe’s top driver, Furiosa, is driving the giant tanker, surrounded by a squadron of motorbikes and war hot rods armed to the teeth, one of which is driven by Nux, a deranged, new generation kid who is defined by his unhinged fanaticism.  When Furiosa takes an unexpected turn, spotted by Joe’s lookout team, all Hell breaks loose, as this act of defiance opens the floodgates of rebellion, where hidden in the truck Furiosa is smuggling out Joe’s five wives, each one selected for breeding, hoping to lead them to freedom.  What follows is a furious assault to repossess his property, while Max remains chained to the car wearing an armored mask throughout the heated battle, with the tanker plunging headfirst into the middle of a raging sandstorm.  In the lull after the storm, Max and Furiosa have their own little standoff, where he discovers the young girls, uses cutters to remove the chains, and tries to drive away on his own, but the gas tank is rigged, forcing them, for better or for worse, to forge an uneasy alliance.  This rag tag team of survivors, including Nux who changes sides once he’s introduced to female companionship, and others they meet along the way, continue to come under waves of relentless assaults for the remainder of the picture, a frenetically choreographed run for freedom that accentuates Miller’s prowess at directing exhilarating, ultra-kinetic action scenes of fire, bloody chaos and sheer mayhem while barreling through the wide-open expanse of the desert, where THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (2001, 03, 06, 09, 11, 13, 15) meets a modern day LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) in a nonstop action adventure movie.  As to claims of a feminist theme, let’s not to get carried away, as it’s only in the sense that women, just like men, can become fantasy figures who lead revolts and fire guns and rifles defending themselves, while killing others with equal success.  Hardly worthy of applause, but many in the theater were cheering, much as they did generations earlier for John Wayne in westerns.