DOM HEMINGWAY (review)

DOM HEMINGWAY

Starring Jude Law, Richard E. Grant and Demian Bichir

Dom Hemingway: Is my cock exquisite?

Perhaps it is my own personal bias but I have a very hard time getting behind characters who do whatever they please for their entire lives, no matter how that affects the people around them, and then expect the people they’ve burned to find forgiveness for them when they’re in their moment of need but yet haven’t changed in the least. The title character in DOM HEMINGWAY is definitely one of these people. Writer/Director, Richard Shepard (whose work on the HBO series, Girls, has been some of their best) wants very much for us to feel badly for Dom’s plight, and Jude Law, who plays the man with a great deal of vim and vigour, does his mightiest to get us on board with him too, but I was just not swayed. Sometimes there are just no redeeming factors to be found.

We meet Dom mid blow job in prison. We don’t see just who is on their knees but this is prison after all so we can assume it isn’t a woman. Oh how the mighty have clearly fallen. I mean, nothing could be lower for a straight man than succumbing to being orally pleasured by another man. DOM HEMINGWAY is full of these adorably macho misgivings! Anyway, Dom, a professional safe cracker, has spent 12 years in prison because he would not rat out his former employer. It is finally time for his release, which means it is time for him to collect for the years of loyalty that cost him his marriage and his relationship with his daughter. At first, everything seems to be going Dom’s way; he is being showered with cash and booze and drugs and women, who are constantly being given away as gifts and who, with the exception of Dom’s daughter (Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke), are only ever seen on screen as buxom whores. Naturally, everything falls apart and suddenly Dom finds himself without a plan, proving that it isn’t only honest, hard working folks who can find themselves screwed out of their pensions.

DOM HEMINGWAY, both the film and the man, suffer from what I will refer to as big penis syndrome. Men with this “affliction” tend to think they can do whatever they want, that their endowment gives them the right to walk straight into traffic as if that’s meant to be an impressive act. The truth of it is though that there isn’t much to them past what they’re packing and it is extremely easy to see right through all of their antics, exposing them as nothing more than empty distractions. And when the theatrics are as abundant as they are here, I start to wonder if maybe what they don’t want us to see is just how small a man they really are underneath it all. Films with this bravado are no different. DOM HEMINGWAY wreaks of desperation at times; it tries so hard to be different and outlandish in hopes that we won’t notice there isn’t really anything to it we haven’t seen before.

Your turn!

How many sheep would you give Dom Hemingway?

[kkstarratings]