Dominique

Opening with the implied death of a family of cute tortoises, Dominique is an action film that puts its cards on the table. It packs a substantial body count, and no-one is safe – apart from the heroine of course, as she clearly has franchise potential, and her ability to survive being dropped out of the sky at the outset implies a certain level of indestructability.

To be fair, she was inside a plane when she fell. The shouty men who ran over the tortoises are en route to check out the wreckage, one of them apparently having shot it down on the first place. Inside they find a heavy box wrapped in chains, and though any Django fan will have a good guess at what’s inside, for the meantime they’re unable to get it open. As they struggle to haul it away, their boss smokes in the wreckage, like an idiot, and decides to feel up the corpse of the pilot. Unfortunately for him she’s not as dead as she looked. Soon he is, and she’s smoking his cigarette in the wreckage, like an idiot.

This is Dominique (Oksana Orlan), a Ukrainian assassin on the run, as we learn from brief flashbacks in sultry black and white. With a hair-trigger temper and an elaborate phoenix tattoo on her back, she seems destined to find trouble wherever she goes. Drinking neat liquor in a scuzzy bar in nearby San Lucas, she lets herself get picked up by a sweet young man (Sebastián Carvajal) who is palpably out of his depth, but that leads to trouble of a different kind when she discovers that he’s a police charged with checking out her plane. What’s more, unbeknownst to her, he’s investigating corruption in the force. Let’s just say that this does not go well for him. When his family faces the wrath of corrupt cops and cartels, Dominique has to decide whether to look after number one, as it’s implied she always has, or make a stand and do all she can to defend them.

It would be a short film if she chose the former option, so there’s not much of a surprise here. Indeed, pretty much everything about Michael S Ojeda’s film is by the book – right down to Chekov’s pregnant woman – but it rattles along fast enough to keep viewers from worrying about that too much, and Orlan has sufficient charisma to pull it off. Towards the end of the big stand-off, the action set pieces get a bit samey, and it’s silly throughout, but she plays it wonderfully straight and in the process gives it an emotional impact too often missing from these things.

Whilst it remains firmly on the B-list, this is competently directed, and if all you’re looking for is a shoot-up to pass the time on a Saturday night, it will serve you well enough.