Film - Almond eyes are not enough to turn a star into a bounty hunter, writes John Lyttle Domino (15)

I have just come back from watching Keira Knightley play a bounty hun- ter in the incoherent action thriller Domino and, I have to tell you, I'm not waiting for her Winnie Mandela. It's not that Keira isn't adorable, it's just that adorable is all Keira ever is. Early on in Domino, she is asked why she wants to be a bounty hunter - why not a rocket scientist, or perhaps a sumo wrestler? She narrows her almond eyes and purses her sofa lips like a Chanel model who's been told to stare at the perfume bottle and look mean, and replies: "I wanted to have some fun." Fun turns out to be Keira snarling like a ferocious animal and kicking in doors like a five-year-old who has just been told that the birthday-cake icing is vanilla instead of chocolate as promised.

Keira also handles guns the size of a motorhome, and her blink rate flutters from flirtatious to hurricane when actually obliged to point one and shoot.

If Domino's a dud, that is partly the fault of Tony Scott, the Top Gun director, who these days has the attention span of an illiterate fruit fly with a raging amphetamine habit. (Plot? Who needs it?) But mostly it's to do with you-know-who. Let's be honest: you could eat Keira with a spoon but the only bounty hunter she should play is the sort who came in search of paradise. Dressing up in fatigues and leathers straight from the Harvey Nicks Urban Commando Collection proves nothing except that you should never wear camouflage trousers so tight they are taking your blood pressure.

If Keira isn't rough stuff, is she at least hot stuff? Afraid not. Later on she has to lap-dance - bounty hunter, lap dancer, it's easy to get confused. What can I say? I once threw my office chair out the window on to a bouncy castle and witnessed more erotic movement. Keira may be touted as the new Audrey Hepburn (swan neck, peach skin, pathologically genteel) but she's closer to the new Anna Neagle: too nice for vice. She's top totty with the type of middle-aged ex-public-school boy who believes he's better bred because he flicks his drool away with a crooked pinkie finger, just like Nanny taught him to. He loves that Keira is dewy fresh, but the fact that she's clearly a lady is the real turn-on. This is the sort of Englishman who masturbates while thinking about Celia Johnson. British cinema has been catering to this demographic's kinky demands for decades, and still does. Why else would the suburban Liz Hurley even now adopt a Mayfair drawl Deborah Kerr might have thought a bit much?

Can a posh gel be a warrior princess? Sure. Domino is based on the true story of the late Domino Harvey, daughter of the actor Laurence Harvey. But she was a different sort of posh (drug-addicted and suicidal, as it transpires). There hasn't been miscasting on this scale since, well, since Keira starred in last year's King Arthur as a Druid Guinevere with a bow and arrow and strategically smeared with blue mud. No, strike that. There hasn't been miscasting on this scale since Keira appeared in The Jacket this year and plumbed the unhappy depths of a diner waitress's soul by applying shadow under her eyes and not on the lids. Keira told the press she took the role because she "wanted to stretch". Pilates, dear, Pilates.

Unfortunately, Keira apparently can't play the parts that should suit, either. Friends dragged me to see the new version of Pride and Prejudice, and it took both of them to physically restrain me from leaping from my seat and running down the aisle shouting, "The point of the book is that Elizabeth Bennet is mistaken, not that she's a shallow little bitch!" Keira gurgles and smirks until the palms of your hands itch to smack her. Why would Darcy exempt her odious behaviour from his censure of the rest of her family?

Perhaps because the gurgling and the smirking are strictly karaoke. She doesn't so much act as pretend really hard. Which would not matter if Keira was the star she's billed as being - it's nice if a star can act, but if it were mandatory Lindsay Lohan would be screwed - yet strip away the hype and, to date, Keira has been period detail in Pirates of the Caribbean and fluffy support in Bend It Like Beckham. While Beckham's lead actress, Parminder Nagra, scrapes a living on ER, Domino compels Keira to carry a picture and inadvertently exposes her for what she is: a luxury import Hollywood ordered from the Merchant Ivory Heritage catalogue to complement those fine figurines Kate Winslet, Kate Beckinsale, Helena Bonham Carter and Rachel Weisz, only to discover the business had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

But then Domino is a movie about an out lesbian who isn't out in this version of her story, which wastes Lucy Liu, unreels clip after clip of The Jerry Springer Show for no discernible reason and employs Mickey Rourke to impersonate a human being.

Now, that is miscasting.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website