Dom Hemingway (Jude Law) is a larger-than-life safecracker with a loose fuse, funny, profane, and dangerous. Back on the streets of London after twelve years in prison, it is time to collect what he is owed for keeping his mouth shut.
Travelling with his devoted best friend Dickie (Richard E. Grant), Dom visits his crime boss Mr Fontaine (Demián Bichir) in the south of France to claim his reward. But Dom's drunk and drug-fueled ego decides what he has lost can not be replaced. One car accident and a femme fatale later, Dom realises his priority must be to reconnect with his long-lost daughter Evelyn (Emilia Clarke).
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His name conjures up images of fine Champagne combined with a literary lion.
But Dom Hemingway is a crass, cocksure London safecracker with anger-management issues.
Jude Law put on 30 pounds to play this slimeball. But the weightier question is, why would he bother to take this worn-out role, at any size?
Dom Hemingway (* ½ out of four; rated R; opens Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles) is an excessively theatrical knockoff of Guy Ritchie movies (RocknRolla, Snatch), and Dom is a far less seductive Cockney-accented animal than Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. It's all-too-familiar terrain, stocked with flimsy caricatures.
Dom is a madman with bad teeth and mutton-chop sideburns. That he's played by Law, who's known for his romantic leading roles, amounts to stunt casting.
The first scene features the brutish Dom extolling the virtues of a part of his anatomy that is off-camera getting a pleasurable workout. Meant to be audaciously funny, his profane hyperbole is mostly obnoxious. Essentially everything Dom says or does falls into the same off-putting category. Worse, his garbled, derivative story doesn't go anywhere.
Released from prison after 12 years, Dom first stops to see the bloke who married and cared for his ex-wife while she was sick and he was behind bars. Dom beats him to a pulp. Before this, he was merely grotesquely egotistical. After this bloody attack, Dom proves he's a vicious psychopath.
Somehow, we're supposed to buy that what Dom is really after is redemption — despite the fact that he spends most of his time snorting coke, hanging with hookers and drinking himself into oblivion. He claims to want a relationship with his twentysomething daughter, Evelyn (Emilia Clarke) — now the mother of a young son — though he has not bothered to communicate with her in a dozen years. Understandably, she wants little to do with him.
Law acts up a storm, but it all amounts to very little. There's a feeling of frantic artifice and stagy theatricality to his performance, underscored by over-the-top dialogue. It reaches a peak during a key scene between Law, his pal Dickie (Richard E. Grant) and Russian crime lord Ivan Fontaine (Demián Bichir) at Ivan's villa in the south of France. Dom kept his mouth shut and protected Fontaine, which led to Dom's prison term. He now demands "a present" for his loyalty.
Apparently, we're supposed to root for this swaggering sleazebag. Full of exuberant piss and vinegar, Dom is meant to have a deeply buried heart of gold. In other words, he's a cinematic cliché.
Writer/director Richard Shepard's 2005 dark comedy, The Matador,about an unlikely friendship between a hit man (Pierce Brosnan) and a struggling salesman (Greg Kinnear), was far more clever and affecting.
Here, both Shepard and Law are trying too hard — and yet it's never enough to create an authentic, full-bodied character. All the effort goes into brash outrageousness. Then, amid all the explosive nastiness, the story blandly shifts gears to a sentimentality that especially doesn't ring true.
Also in the phony category is a ditzy-sweet American named Melody (Kerry Condon) who comes off like a blend of fairy godmother and New Age soothsayer. She predicts good things for the useless Dom. Since he's so unpleasant, we can only hope she's as deluded as she seems.
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