Only my personal vow never to walk out of a movie kept me in the theater until the end credits, but not because Domino was atrocious or anything. It's bad, but in a curiously deadening way. It wants your admiration desperately, like a psychedelic trick pony mad for a carrot, or an annoying kid with a laser pointer. But all the stylistic flourishes, sound effects, hypersaturated palette, camera tricks, and weed-whacker editing the film uses to get your attention add up to precious little aside from a sound-and-light show and some irritated foot-tapping from the audience. It's sub-sub-sub-sub-Natural Born Killers exploitative, noisy nonsense.

Domino (Keira Knightley) was the daughter of British actor Laurence Harvey, and grew up as a pampered rich girl. She got kicked out of several boarding schools and flunked out of college; she tried her hand at modeling and took acting classes. Then she decided she wanted to be a bounty hunter, and she teamed up with legendary bounty hunter Ed Mosbey (Mickey Rourke) and his partner Choco (Edgar Martinez). They worked for Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo), a bail bondsman. We first meet Domino as she's being interrogated by an FBI agent (Lucy Liu) about the theft of $10 million in mob money. We get the story of that money, along with the story of Domino's life, in snippets, as Richard Kelly's tortuous script flings us backward and forward in time, sometimes showing us the same events more than once. The story of the money is a labyrinthine tale of double-crosses, misunderstandings, and mistaken identities. After seeing the film, I'm not positive that I could explain who is involved and how, so I won't. It doesn't matter anyway.

It warns us early on: "based on a true story—sort of." The film features narration in which the fictional Domino refuses to tell which parts of the story were true; perhaps this is its answer to the real Harvey, who was upset at all the changes, including the obliviation of her bisexuality and the inclusion of a hunky leading man for her to fall in love with. The real Domino Harvey was found dead in a bathtub, the victim of a drug overdose and the target of federal drug charges, several months before this film was released. The filmmakers had already reshot the ending of the film twice, but they didn't have the time or the inclination to fit this sobering little coda on their hyper little film. The film has little to do with Harvey's life, which is sad, because that might have made a great film (in the hands of someone other than the hack director Tony Scott).

The film rests on Knightley's emaciated shoulders, and she simply doesn't have what it takes to pull it off. Judging from the real Domino's success as a bounty hunter, she did. Knightley comes off as a pretty rich girl slumming, hiding behind clouds of cigarette smoke, which is funny, because much of the real Domino's success came from people underestimating her, thinking she was a pretty rich girl slumming. I have yet to see Knightley in anything where she was more than charming (like in Bend It Like Beckham). Mickey Rourke, who does have what it takes, does what he can with the material, but he, too, is given little more than tough-guy dialogue and a cloud of smoke. The most interesting character is Choco, the invented love interest; Martinez is an interesting mix of tough-guy swagger and believable fragility. He provides one of the film's few honest moments, but it comes right before he blows a guy's arm off with a shotgun, so the effect is somewhat muted.

The inclusion of a subplot involving Christopher Walken as a reality TV producer adds nothing, although the filmmakers likely thought they were making an edgy commentary on celebrity worship. There's nothing of value in this film. It wastes the talents of a great screenwriter, Richard Kelly, who wrote and directed Donnie Darko and hopefully will take the money he made from this tripe and make something great. I have little praise for Tony Scott, whose resume is filled with sound and fury signifying nothing (although I did enjoy True Romance and The Last Boy Scout, not that I'd claim that either was a good film). Domino's greatest sin is being boring: all the flash and spinning cameras the $50 million budget could buy couldn't keep me from looking impatiently at my watch during most of its overlong two-hour running time.