Spawned into action
If only there were more action movies 'inspired' by the exploits of movie-star offspring. John Patterson pitches in
Saturday October 8, 2005
The Guardian
Tony Scott's Domino is already, by some distance, the movie to beat for this year's Golden Raspberry Awards. It may yet be pipped at the post by Cameron Crowe's atrocious Elizabethtown, but my money's still on the movie that offers us Keira Knightley, adorable and tiny as ever, blazing away with a pair of 50-pound machine-guns - the kind of hardware that in real life would knock a 250-pound man off his feet. All the while, Keira's kicking down doors, hustling bad guys nine times her size to the floor, making them "assume the position, bitch!" and twittering away in an accent so plummy - "May name is Dominay Hah-vee and I'm a byne-tee huntah!" - that she makes Kristin Scott Thomas sound like Kathy Burke.
But the dunderheaded demographic that lionises the Scott oeuvre won't give a stuff. And now Domino has joined her late dad, Laurence, of Room At The Top and The Manchurian Candidate, having died of an overdose a couple of months ago. Her life is cited as "an inspiration" for the movie, which soon soars off into outlandishly ridiculous fictional shenanigans the like of which Domino herself never experienced.
If only we could now sit back and enjoy a few more flicks in which the spoiled rich kids of upper-echelon Hollywood (which, to be scrupulously fair, is a category that didn't include Domino) are reconfigured as 007 or Dirty Harry types. There's a splendidly nauseating show on US TV right now called My Super Sweet Sixteen, in which overindulged millionaires' children - whose life-model is the vain, empty, rodent-faced Paris Hilton - scream and bitch when Daddy only buys them a $45K Range Rover or when he fails to spend more than a quarter-mill on the titular birthday party. Imagine if these overentitled hellions started demanding that Daddy finance their own action movie for them: bring on XXX - Action Bratz! Or, of course, Domino.
I foresee the fiery youths of top-table Tinseltown lining up to have movies "inspired" by their tiresome antics: Griffin O'Neal, son of Ryan, who accidentally killed Gian-Carlo Coppola, son of Francis, in a speedboat, makes good while sawing the heads off bad guys with his twin props; Victoria Sellers goes from making Sex Tips videos with Heidi Fleiss to superheroine status in her remake of Chesty Morgan's Deadly Weapons; Cheryl Crane, who stabbed her mother Lana Turner's mobster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death, could handily remake Abel Ferrara's Ms 45, blowing away sexist pigs and ass-grabbers without breaking a finely manicured nail.
Ah, the possibilities ... On the other hand, I wouldn't complain much if the fabulously rich started laying heavy hands on their children's bottoms, or enrolled the lot of them in Military School or Fat Camp. That would suit me fine, too.