Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as Christian, a Danish cop who, as the story opens, goes with his older partner, Lars (Soren Malling), to respond to an alleged domestic disturbance. They quickly catch the apparent perpetrator (Eriq Ebouaney) as he is trying to leave, but when Christian heads upstairs to investigate further, he realizes that he left his gun at home and is force to borrow Lars'. He quickly discovers evidence of much more than a domestic dispute but by the time he gets back to Lars, the man they caught has slipped his bonds, slit Lars’ throat and jumped out the window to escape via the rooftops. Christian gives chase but both plummet to the ground, and he thinks he sees a couple of strange men dragging the suspect away.
It turns out that the suspect is actually Ezra Tarzi, a Libyan who is in pursuit of ISIS leader Salah Al Din (Mohammed Azaay) in order to avenge the murder of his father. The people who nabbed Ezra at the scene turn out to be CIA and the agent in charge (Guy Pearce) forces Ezra to continue his pursuit of Al Din and do the dirty work that the US government is prevented from doing, going so far as to imprison his family to force him to comply. While Al Din and his comrades set off to wreak havoc via a brutal suicide attack that they plan to broadcast on the Internet, Ezra goes off in pursuit while he, in turn, is being followed by Christian, who has already been suspended from the force because of the misplaced gun. Meanwhile, another Danish cop named Alex (Carice van Houten) also has deeply personal reasons for wanting to bring down Lars’ killer.
The key problem with “Domino” is that the screenplay by Petter Skavlan never quite clicks together. Granted, one does not normally go to a Brian De Palma film for the airtight narratives, but this one, either by nature or by the result of unfortunate last-minute edits, just doesn’t work. The notion of the multiple pursuits is reasonably clever but not much is done with it—there are too many scenes that just start and stop so abruptly that they leave you wondering if you somehow missed something. The characters are also given only the most perfunctory bits of development and the ones that do stand out do so mostly because of the personalities of the actors: Ebouaney (who was a menacing presence in De Palma’s “Femme Fatale”) is fairly electrifying and Pearce is clearly having fun chewing the scenery as the CIA sleaze. On the other hand, van Houten can be a striking screen presence (as she showed in Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book”) but is hampered here by a character who seems to have been the possible victim of the editing, while Coster-Waldau is bland as the largely ineffectual hero.
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