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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWriter-director Richard Shepard has a real thing for getting dapper Brit actors on the verge of their sell-by date to take a walk on the wild side. Back in 2005, The Matador turned onetime Bond-franchise clotheshorse Pierce Brosnan into a booze-soaked, pot-bellied professional assassin luring sad-sack businessman Greg Kinnear to his doom. Almost a decade later, the new Dom Hemingway opens with a barbarically hirsute Jude Law delivering a manic ode to the glories of his cock while getting a prison blowjob.\u00A0 Gee, do you suppose somebody thought it was time for an image makeover? That's plainly what tempted Brosnan, and Law's career these days looks even more on the verge of terminal vagueness.\n\nHe's playing an expert safecracker who's done 12 years in the pen after refusing to rat out Demian Bichir as Mr. Fontaine, the elegant Russian hit man who hired him for his last job. Once he gets sprung, Dom wastes no time tracking down and beating the crap out of the guy who shacked up with his now dead wife while he was behind bars. Then, after he's been treated to a cocaine-and-hookers orgy on Mr. Fontaine's tab, he and his long-suffering sidekick Dickie (Richard E. Grant) head off to the silky Russian's villa in the south of France to collect Dom's payoff for his silence.\n\nAs crude as Shepard's semi-parodic\u2014yeah, sure\u2014fantasies of the amoral high life are, the opening sequences have enough energy and motor-mouthed, obscene comic blather to give you hopes for the movie. More drugs-and-tarts debauchery ensues at the villa, with only Fontaine's mistress Paolina (Madalina Ghenea) off limits. Naturally, Dom decides she's his rightful reward\u2014and then alienates his benefactor even more with drunken insults and shenanigans. But Fontaine pays him off anyway, only for Dom to lose the money after a car wreck that's Shepherd's best-staged bit.\n\nYet that's around when Dom Hemingway's zest\u2014which is already on the strained side\u2014leaks away for good. Once Dom is back in London and looking to recoup his fortunes, the tone turns more and more muddled and wayward, from an excess of labored horseplay with a black gangster (Jumayn Hunter) who's never forgiven our hero for killing the family cat\u2014what, that joke again?\u2014to Dom's maudlin attempt to reconcile with the estranged daughter (Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke, as always a pleasure to look at but not given anything interesting to do here) who's now the mother of his impossibly cute, half-Senegalese grandchild.\n\nUp to a point, you can appreciate the theme Shepard is waddling in search of with two left feet: a portrait of old-school, self-destructive macho impulse\u2014Hemingway, get it?\u2014 at sea in the multiculti era. But the mix of sentimentality and blowhard narstiness just ends up festering on the screen. It doesn't help that the women in the movie are treated atrociously; they're either waifs or bitches, and one-note either way.\n\nIt would take one heck of a lead actor to make this goulash go down, and Jude Law is\u2026 well, not that actor. You can see how hard he's working to convince us he's relishing the part\u2014he's always been eager to please, after all\u2014and he doesn't do badly by the foul-mouthed rants that Shepard can apparently churn out like David Mamet-ized fortune cookies. But once we glumly realize that we're supposed to feel Dom's pain, we're no longer able to enjoy him. Law doesn't have the wit to understand that Dom's bathetic streak ought to have the same edge of crazy vainglory as his roguish side.\n\nInstead, whenever the actor gets a chance to turn mawkish\u2014above all, in a shameless scene of mourning at his dead wife's gravesite\u2014he reverts to being the blubbery, feckless Law we know, with a much too evident gratitude at being back in his comfort zone. And since nobody else in the movie is vivid enough to provide any sort of contrapuntal liveliness\u2014neither Bichir nor Hunter are especially well served by the script, which gives Law a near monopoly on good lines\u2014we're basically trapped with this schmuck for the duration.\n\nOn top of that, the whole thing feels weirdly dated. For all of Shepard's frenetic pseudo-inventiveness, there's hardly a fresh note in it, from the father-daughter treacle to the movie's condescending racial politics (I probably don't need to tell you that Clarke's Senegalese boyfriend is a calf-eyed paragon of patient kindness to benighted old Dom). Ultimately, all you need to know about Dom Hemingway is that it's supposedly about a safecracker\u2014and the only time the hero cracks a safe, it's by shaking it up and down before dropping it on the floor in the hope it will spring open. As a metaphor for Shepard's m.o. this go-round, that one's mighty hard to beat."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/review-jude-law-dom-hemingway-movie>