415-369-6207
Richard Shepard's Dom Hemingway begins with jailbird Hemingway (a ripped and hirsute Jude Law) giving an extended monologue on the exquisiteness of his junk, all while being serviced offscreen by a fellow inmate, and the movie never really stops being about his penis on both metaphoric and literal levels. Released from a 12-year prison sentence into a multicultural London, Hemingway reunites with his partner (Richard E. Grant), seeks payback from his old crime boss (Demian Bichir), and tries to reconnect with his justifiably angry daughter (Emilia Clark, showing more acting chops than she ever has as Game of Thrones' Daenerys Targaryen). Like most contemporary British crime films, Dom Hemingway is slick and flashy (if never quite as kinetic as last year's Trance), and though it's an original screenplay, frequent intertitles add to a feeling that it's a not-quite-successful adaptation of a novel. Law is the center of every scene, and he throws himself into what is a very verbose, male-fantasy figure. Unfortunately, even by gangster movie standards, Dom Hemingway's female characters are just a series of one-note bitches, whores, and duplicitous gun molls. (The hippie girl Melody is downright inexplicable.) Still, the fact that he's trying to fix his relationship with a daughter rather than a son is a nice of change of pace these days.
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