50
The film goes through its motions too quickly for its imagery to convey the irrepressible force of provocation.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
Just when you want to outright dismiss it, a pinprick of sound and vision peeks through the straight-to-DVD dross. And just when you start to think someone’s starting to gin up that old black magic, the whole thing simply topples over with a loud thud.
60
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
De Palma can’t realize all the elaborate effects he clearly wanted (the film’s climax occurs at a bullfight that’s conspicuously not crowded). But his direction often compensates with B-movie energy, particularly when he’s able to concentrate on his perverse vision.
33
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Domino is, for large stretches, just ludicrous—and atypically boring. It’s a sad sight to see from a filmmaker who, once upon a time, excelled at drawing a viewer into the thrill of seeing a sequence come together, with all the pieces falling into place. In Domino, one finds only the pieces.
40
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
He (De Palma) has rarely been guilty of dullness, as he is with Domino, a counterterrorism thriller offering just slightly more excitement than the average TV police procedural.
25
The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth
The film’s half-hearted politics — which do make a statement, regardless of intent — are perhaps less egregious than a movie that’s simply going through the motions for the bulk of its running time.
75
Make no mistake, it’s mostly staged for campiness. More often than not that De Palma touch is zooming in on the specter of terrorism until it can find something ridiculous, heightened, thrilling in their possibilities. The rub is that Domino comes into a world with too many scarring reflections of itself to sit right. How amusing that a director so fascinated with the voyeurism-violence dichotomy would make a terrorist thriller about insurgents using the power of propaganda.
88
RogerEbert.com by Peter Sobczynski
While the end result is certainly no masterpiece, it is still better than the average action potboiler and contains a couple of exhilarating set pieces that offer further proof—not that any is needed at this point—that De Palma remains one of the unquestioned masters of creating and executing moments of pure cinema.
38
Domino is a drab, implausible and melodramatic terrorism thriller showing his ongoing interest in the post 9-11 world of “Redacted" (2007). Drab, that is, until he gets to one of those famous set-pieces.
30
Screen Daily by Stephen Whitty
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Domino dishes it up as a sloppy mess of warmed-over clichés. Instead of his old high style and kinky violence, director Brian De Palma delivers only crude thrills and ugly stereotypes, a soggy bag of junk-food snacks.