The Transcendence of Dom Hemingway

Jude Law doing his very best to slay his previous golden boy typecasting in “Dom Hemingway,” one of the year’s worst films.

“Dom Hemingway” and “Transcendence” — Two Appallingly Bad Films for the Price of One

Does this mean I get my money back — twice?

Dom Hemingway is a grotesquely pointless film starring Jude Law.  The movie opens up with the title character receiving a zesty prison blowjob that lasts several minutes, but which seems squeamishly longer.

Let just say within my viewing audience, there were a lot of vexatious bodies shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

Good God, when will this ever end?

During that ghastly opening scene, the camera remains transfixed entirely on Dom’s mutton-chopped face and hairy torso as he waxes philosophical about various subjects — mostly having to do with his penis.  After the scene’s (literal) climax, another male inmate suddenly rises from his knees, stands up, and walks off.

Wait.  It gets better.

Once the opening credits roll, during which Dom gets released from prison, the beefy star sporting the worst set of lambchop sideburns ever recorded on film approaches a jolly-natured mechanic working in a garage and proceeds to beat the man’s brains out with his two iron fists, bludgeoning the poor victim nearly to death.

By this point, my movie meter “fuck count” had already exploded.

If this sounds like your idea of “entertainment,” then sit back, relax, and enjoy.  Wallow in and savor what can only be described as an amalgamation of senseless violence and excessive profanity, punctuated with laughably absurd sentimentality.

Mind you, Dom does have a softer side.  This tenderness is manifested in a worn-out photo of his estranged daughter which he carries tucked inside his wallet.  So, between engaging in sweaty prison blowjobs, excessive drunkenness, illogical outbursts where he beats his victims into a bloody pulp, and snorting lines of coke, Dom’s lovely daughter is always on his mind.  How sweet.  All that’s missing here is the hooker with a heart of gold.  Oh wait, there’s that, too.

I lasted just 16 minutes and a few seconds before finally storming out in disgust.

What a worthless piece of shit!

Everyone knows that I don’t offend easily.  But by the time my shoes were firmly planted outside on the lobby carpet, we were already audience members number 5 and 6 who had fled what can only be described as a cinematic crime scene.  The couple who exited immediately prior to us (they lasted 14 minutes) were actually talking to the theater manager and got their money back.

Yes, Dom Hemingway is that bad.

I admit it.  I’m a sick self-indulgent pervert who usually gets off on these quirky British crime dramas brimming with scum.  Credentials:  I consider Sexy Beast to be a masterpiece.  With Dom, I expected yet another dark Guy Ritchie-Esque gangster comedy filled with wild-eyed characters spewing profanity in the same voice as Prince Charles.  To we unwashed Americans, there’s still something sinisterly wonderful about thugs enunciating British accents.

Perhaps the film improves from the point where we departed.  I don’t know.  I’ll never know.  What I do know is — in the third scene Dom bangs a couple of bar girls twisted into some really contorted sexual positions.  Oh yeah, he was also giving the audience another profane soliloquy of his prowess.  I felt like I was watching outtakes from Caligula, considered by many to be the worst movie ever made.

There’s such a thing as great bad movies.  Think Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, a camp classic.  Or, The Born Losers, a wonderfully awful biker movie from the 1960s.  Dom, however, is just plain bad.  Not great bad.  Bad bad.

Following that brief flirtation with Dom Hemingway, we found ourselves wandering aimlessly out in the lobby.  We too considered asking for a refund.  But we’d come to watch a movie, after all, and there were other options.

So instead, we sneaked into an adjacent movie theater where Transcendence was showing.  That’s the new science-fiction film starring Johnny Depp, which is supposed to be about artificial intelligence.  Poor Dom could have used a splice off that reel.

If Dom shoved one’s senses beyond the breaking point, then Transcendence manages to do just the opposite.  It was about as dull as watching an old episode of The X-Files.

Indeed, Transcendence should have been a sure-fire winner and box office hit.  The story is both mesmerizing and entirely relevant to contemporary events.  We’re forced to confront the ramifications of artificial intelligence, which can either be used for good or evil.

Johnny Depp plays a Steve Jobs-like character.  He’s the master of an alternative universe which allows brain impulses — including every conscious and subconscious thought — to be uploaded by computer and then stored in a giant database.  That gives way to an actual person who exists on a microchip.  However, this secret technology hasn’t yet been tested on humans.  So when Depp learns he has only six weeks to live, he agrees to play the guinea pig.  The supercomputer captures Depp’s brain entirely, including every spark in his cranium — from his knowledge to his emotional state.

Various powers learn of this emerging technology and the secret project.  Naturally, the battle is on.  They want it for themselves.  So, the rest of the movie focuses on the struggle between powerful forces fighting to use of this technology for their own selfish purposes.

Trouble is — we don’t know the good guys from the bad guys.  It’s a total mess.  This could be an intriguing puzzle and plot device, trying to figure out who’s good versus evil.  In fact, the basis for a thriller is here.  However, about two-thirds into the movie, the plot becomes so confusing that one finally gives up.  We don’t care anymore.

Gee, I wonder if Dom Hemingway is still playing back in Theater 9.  Maybe we can catch the final half-hour and see another coke binge.

There are no spoilers here, not that it would matter.  However, a final battle scene takes place that’s so laughingly absurd, one is compelled to holler at the movie screen (which I found myself doing, to no one else’s apparent annoyance).  Think of the voice on Mystery Science Theater.

The good guys (Depp and his wife, played by a wooden actress I won’t even bother to look up) finagle some finances over the Internet and get enough money to build a massive high-tech complex out in the middle of the desert, next to a small town.  This nameless town becomes the new home of the “secret” project directed by Depp (his thoughts and directives now encased in software and carried out by his grieving wife).  The townspeople become essential to the plot for reasons I won’t go into.  Yet they seem to have stepped right out of Deliverance.  I wonder — must every one who doesn’t live in Los Angeles or New York be typecast as a brainless yokel?  There’s even a blind boy wearing a flannel shirt.  All that’s missing here are the buck teeth and a banjo.

Near the ending (which can’t arrive soon enough), the high-tech complex comes under attack, presumably by the federal government.  Yet, this modern 21st Century army uses weapons right out of World War I.  The soldiers are equipped with rifles and use rocket launchers.  Watching the bombs exploding on the complex is jaw-dropping.  Is this really the way our government would attack a secret underground complex out in the middle of the desert that has the capacity to change the world?  With canons and M-16 rifles?  The Army reserves look like they’re right out of Stripes.

In short, Transcendence needs a lot more Dom Hemingway.  And Dom Hemingway needs more Transcendence.

Maybe the two directors should have combined their productions.  How about this.  Throw the brilliant high-tech guru played by Johnny Depp into prison, while having the brutish Jude Law try and take over the world with that funny British accent.  Now, that would make one helluva movie.

DOM HEMINGWAY — ZERO STARS

TRANSCENDENCE — ONE STAR