I assume it was Jude Law’s birthday and someone wanted to give him “the role of a lifetime.” So they wrote him a script called Dom Hemingway, about a loquacious safecracker with impulse control issues who reconnects with his daughter after spending a dozen years in the slammer. It’s kind of a sweet gesture, really, and it sure is nice to see Jude Law appreciated for the fine thespian he is, but although the actor happily mugs his way through vicious mid-prison blowjob monologues about the finer qualities of his penis, the movie surrounding his eager, likable performance just doesn’t click.
Writer/director Richard Shepard’s film announces its presence from frame one (that blowjob), capturing our attention with brash bravado but too quickly reveals that it has nothing to say, not really. Shepard also wrote and directed The Matador, a similar but better motion picture about a career criminal undergoing his mid-life crisis. But whereas the comparatively restrained The Matador centered its attentions around a recognizable human being who ingratiates himself with an engaging but lonely hired assassin, Dom Hemingway drops the audience into the title character’s world and refuses to let us leave this arch, artificial place, full of mildly amusing eccentricities but devoid of soul.
Shepard’s filmmaking style has grown more striking over time, with colorful compositions and dramatic title cards. It’s his story that suddenly strikes a flat tone. Dom Hemingway is a character piece about a career criminal who kept his mouth shut after more than a decade in prison, and who thinks that he’s entitled to financial success – and by extension emotional fulfillment – now that he’s free. But he sabotages himself at every turn, partying hard enough to lose friends and also a staggering amount of hush money, and taking an ill-advised wager to break into an uncrackable safe or have his precious, soliloquized dick chopped off. Somewhat entertaining events connected by a false emotional tissue. Two excuses for Jude Law to let loose without an actual reason.
Shepard knows that Dom Hemingway is a son of a bitch and sets him on a path to redemption, making amends with his daughter (Emilia Clarke) and perhaps even growing as a human being. But maybe he’s too in love with Jude Law’s cartoon performance to actually let him grow out of it. Dom Hemingway never shows its title character the error of his ways, or even an opportunity to change; it resorts instead to a strange, unearned faith in karma, throwing whatever character development Dom Hemingway could have mustered aside in favor of one “quirky” digression after another. It’s a love note to the idea of a character, not a portrait of a fully realized one who undergoes a journey worth filming, or even takes part a story that’s intriguing enough to carry the overwritten dialogue and underdeveloped characters who populate it.
Dom Hemingway is a character-driven movie that doesn’t let the character drive anywhere. It’s a crime film without actual crimes to keep the audience invested. It’s a comedy that’s so convinced that it’s funny that it never bothers to make us laugh. But to its credit, it’s an opportunity for the charismatic and funny Jude Law to take center stage and remind us why he deserves better roles than he’s been getting. Including the one he’s got in Dom Hemingway.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
