Jude Law’s latest film, Dom Hemingway, which is finally making its way to America, is a rather disappointing tale of a man who just cannot find any good luck.
The movie starts out with one of the funniest openings ever. I won’t spoil it, mainly because it is grossly inappropriate and over the top. With an opening like that, one would think that the rest of the movie would be a hilarious ride, but that simply, in my opinion, is the funniest part of the movie. Dom has been in jail for 12 years for keeping his mouth shut and not ratting out his boss. Now that he is out, he wants to get what he deserves; a lot of money. So we follow him and his friend Dickie, played by Richard E. Grant, to the French villa where Dom’s boss is. Of course, things don’t go as planned and Dom ends up with no money.
What I just explained was about 30 minutes of the 90 minute movie. The script was very poor. Some things in the movie just don’t make sense. Like how Dom winds up at his estranged daughter’s doorstep in England in the middle of the night minutes after being at the French villa, I mean the guy who wrote this must have written Heroes too. The first act is pretty solid, but once acts 2 and 3 come along, it gets hard to see any sort of sense in the structuring of the plot. Once Dom finds his daughter, played by Emilia Clarke (Daenerys on Game of Thrones), one might think he does not need the money after all and he can start to rebuild his relationship with his daughter. Nope, instead she only gets about 10 minutes of screen time and Dom goes off to find a job from some guy he knew from before he went to prison. Yes, he basically forgets all about his lost money once he gets back to England. The movie could have been a lot better if we had gotten more time with his daughter, because then we could have gotten some sort of emotion in the film.
Jude Law is quite good in the film, if not a bit over-the-top like the script. He is a man who has terrible luck, but he also lives very unhealthy lifestyles. His wife died while he was in prison, he has sex with hookers, snorts cocaine, and is constantly drinking some sort of alcoholic beverage. He carries the film with tremendous force and we see both his highs and lows. He “DOMinates” the screen, and only Grant comes close to equaling his screen time.
In the end the movie is nonsensical and almost void of all emotion. The best joke is used at the very beginning, even before we get the title of the film. A lot of the time when watching this, the jokes seemed to have a bit of a delayed reaction among the audience. I’m not sure if it’s because the jokes were bad or what, but there was definitely a lot of silence before a late laugh. It feels like the movie should have had about a third of the scenes cut out and replaced by more of the relationship between Dom and his daughter. So, if you want to see a decent movie that has a great performance from Jude Law, but not much else, check this one out.
In fact, just wait until it comes out on DVD.
Raging Film 