Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - 5:19 PM CDT

I can guarantee the 148 minute cut exists.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - 5:34 PM CDT

These reviews are horrific. I'll wait for Once Upon A Time Hollywood, Joker, Bond 25 and the big one in Christopher Nolan's globe trotting espionage sci-fi action/thriller Tenet. As for Domino I'm still eager to have a look but gutted with most of these reviews.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - 6:22 PM CDT

Reviews, reschmews-- It seems like more of the same to me, these reviews-- with the added touch of many going in believing there was some kind of longer fairy tale cut-- they wore those goggles while watching it and say things like "choppy", that the plot is somehow lost, that it jumps all over.

I really don't get it-- to me it moves very smoothly, with deliberate, purposeful transitions, and the plot is very straightforward. The coda is deliberately jarring. It they are going to criticize it, I just wish they would actually look at what is there on screen and on the soundtrack.

Like, say, Roger Moore's review-- yes, he overall did not like the picture, but he also does not seem to have gone into it thinking there was some phantom cut. You'll notice he seemed to be able to follow the plot just fine.

This is from Roger Moore's review:

So the CIA is using the Libyan to get close to ISIS while the Danish police hop, skip and jump from “fairyland” (Pearce’s CIA designation for Denmark) to the south of Europe, while a pack of generic movie Islamists plot big suicide attacks, complete with machine guns, gullible suicide bombers, drones and streaming two-way video giving the head man (Mohammed Azaay) a first-person shooter video game thrill.

The dialogue is unquotably bland, the situations soap opera melodramatic and the performances perfunctory, although Pearce smacks his lips and chews up his few scenes and Ebouaney, new to films, gets across a hint of his character’s malice born of desperation. Coster-Waldau gets by on good looks and presence, here.

No, what we”re here for are the homages to Hitchcock, a rooftop nod to “Vertigo” and a finale that conjures up memories of “Stagefright” and Doris Day’s turn as a Hitchcock blonde in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

DePalma interjects random bits of up-to-the-minute surveillance tech into a movie whose clumsy, cut-and-paste script sees Danish cops having basic European geography and geopolitics explained to them. And to us.

But that payoff “bravura sequence” has multiple points of view, a crowd, lots of slo-mo and the threat of violence on a vast scale, all of it set to a bolero — not Ravel’s “Bolero,” just a pastiche of it.

And friends, if the entire movie had been as good as this Spanish last act, they’d have had something here.

Almost everything that comes before it is as generic as its title.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - 6:26 PM CDT

*Moore does use the word "clumsy" above, but is describing the screenplay.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - 7:35 PM CDT

I'm tired of all these naysayers trying to bring the experience down. There have been good reviews with the bad ones. I go to a De Palma film for the visual, visceral excitement. I was one of the few who thought REDACTED was a stand-out Kubrick/Godard experiment that worked quite well. REDACTED was rubbished by most critics and when it comes to De Palma I can no longer hack what critics have to say! They say his last great film was MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE and ever since then has lost his touch. I disagree!

Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - 8:41 PM CDT

Thursday, May 30, 2019 - 5:33 PM CDT

@Harry Georgatos: to be fair Redacted also topped the respected Cahier du Cinema's films of 2008 poll. I loved it too. We can bathe in the pleasures of De Palma's usual aesthetic violence all day long but sometimes violence needs to be a needle in the eye that reminds us of that we see.

I'm perversely excited to see if I will find Domino better or worse than my current least-favorite De Palma, The Black Dahlia!

Friday, May 31, 2019 - 1:17 AM CDT

Re Neil, "These reviews are horrific." 

So were the reviews for "Passion," and it's one of De Palma's sneakiest, most subversive films. Many times, De Palma's features are not well-received by critics upon their initial release, like "Blow Out," Redacted," "Obsession" and many more, only to be regarded as classic years later.

Give it a shot. Even a lesser De Palma is better then none at all. Or to be blunt, I'll take a lesser De Palma over routine mass-market summer movies any day. 

Monday, June 3, 2019 - 3:02 PM CDT

Monday, June 3, 2019 - 5:19 PM CDT

I know, I noticed that, too, lol -- I figure most people here at this blog know that Ebouaney was in FEMME FATALE, but yes, definitely not new to films! :D