‘Domino’
Directed by Brian De Palma
Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice van Houten, Guy Pearce
Rated R
"Game of Thrones" fans who still can’t quite say goodbye to Jaime Lannister are unlikely to be aware that the actor who played him, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, stars in a terrible new movie that’s arriving on demand and in limited theatrical release just 12 days after the end of our journey in Westeros.
They would surely love to preserve their memories of the actor as an essential, tortured figure in the HBO spectacle, and not have them at all dimmed by the knowledge that just a few clicks of a remote can offer up a vision of him as a stoic, wooden cop in a tremendous flop.
So, uh, sorry about that.
Yet, duty compels and we must report that, yes, Coster-Waldau does indeed star in "Domino," from the renowned director Brian De Palma, and it is so astonishingly amateurish on so many levels that it’s hard to believe it’s even real.
To make matters even worse for "Game of Thrones" fans, Coster-Waldau’s Christian, a Copenhagen cop, finds himself teamed up with none other than a fellow cop named Alex played by Carice van Houten — Melisandre, the Red Woman of the "GOT" universe.
Together, in a stock narrative that feels ripped straight out of the world’s worst movie from the War on Terror period, they pursue Islamic terrorists from Denmark to Spain who are plotting a massacre and also confront a personal crisis that manages the impressive feat of seeming both ridiculously convoluted and underdeveloped.
This isn’t the first total bust in the De Palma oeuvre — the man is extremely gifted at helming inventive spectacles, from "Dressed to Kill" to "Scarface" and "Mission: Impossible," but has never quite developed a nose for identifying a quality screenplay. This script, by Petter Skavlan, is a wheezy relic that delves into some sketchy territory in the ways it portrays its cartoonish villains and their motivations.
But the key difference between this movie and, say, "Snake Eyes," is that even the set pieces are so poorly rendered it’s as if the director had never stepped behind the camera before.
There is one scene depicting a terror attack in split screen that looks and feels like a video game simulation to such an extent that you wonder how anyone might have thought it to be a good idea, let alone a filmmaking icon.
