DOMINO

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERY THINGS

There was a time, not too long ago, when a new Brian De Palma film was a special thing. He's one of the Name Directors, one of the "Movie Brats" who made a string of amazing films, some of them among my all-time favourites. Sisters, Carrie, The Fury, Dressed To Kill, Blow Out, Scarface, The Untouchables: visceral, exciting, shocking, made with a love of cinema and what editing, music and the camera can do. Okay, so he missed the coconut a few times; who doesn't? The Bonfire Of The Vanities is a bit of a mess, Wise Guys is awful, Mission To Mars is beautiful and fascinating but doesn't work. But I'll still take one of his silly Hitchcock indulgences like Body Double or Raising Cain over most directors' finest work any day: they may be style-over-content, but what style.

But all good things pass, and there hasn't been a proper genuine BDP movie for quite a while now. Passion was a surprisingly so-so retread of the much better and, weirdly, more De Palma-esque French thriller Love Crime, Redacted was a found-footage assemblage, The Black Dahlia had some moments but nothing more. Sadly: Domino (a title which means nothing) isn't bucking the trend. On the night shift, two Danish cops are called to an apparent domestic incident. One is killed in the ensuing incompetence; the other, Christian (Nikolaj Coster Waldau) vows revenge. But the killer is spirited away by Guy Pearce's CIA agent to infiltrate Isis terror cells and Christian, together with his late partner's secret mistress and fellow cop (Carice Van Houten) gives chase across Europe and into Morocco.

It's a Europudding terrorist thriller with two of the man's signature set-pieces (one of which is thoroughly muffed), and a score by his longtime regular composer Pino Donaggio that only faintly echoes his earlier evocations of Herrmann in exactly the same way that the film only faintly echoes De Palma's earlier evocations of Hitchcock. What's so surprising is that a director, possibly an actual auteur, whose best work was so intensely cinematic should now have made a film that feels like a European TV miniseries: he manages to get a few moments with his trademark split diopters and camera angles but for the most part it's surprisingly flat and visually uninteresting (even the punchy fight scenes are poorly handled). There's no real depth to any of the characters and the villains are the worst kind of cheap, ugly, infidel-slaughtering stereotypes. Only in the set-pieces does the old De Palma seem to stir himself: a rooftop chase that's nowhere near as exciting as it looks in the trailer, and the big bullring climax where he can do some crosscutting and slow-motion. Otherwise it's depressingly uninteresting: you'd think it the work of a young up-and-comer who'd been influenced by Brian De Palma but you'd never think it was the work of the man himself.

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