Imagine Natural Born Killers' Mallory Knox as a reality TV show star, less inclined to take up with the wrong man and able to handle her mascara like a pro. This only begins to describe the movie version of model, bounty hunter and drug addict Domino Harvey. Recently dead of an overdose in Los Angeles, the real Harvey shows up at the very end of Tony Scott's film, her shaved head, pale complexion and large eyes haunting in a way that the gussied-up Keira Knightley has not been. Even as it grants the film an unearned weight, this last image underlines Domino's point: Showbiz kills.

Written by Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), Domino comes hard and fast, a two-hour slam-zap assault of broken bodies, harsh lights, gun blasts and tabloid aesthetics. Structured as a jaunty, uneven flashback, it follows Domino (Knightley) as she explains her part in an armored truck robbery to Lucy Liu's FBI agent. They flirt throughout the interview, shot in alternating saturated-color close-ups, but it's teaser material (though the image of Liu sharpening pencils with one of those little plastic devices is not without intrigue).

Domino is not interested in legalities, facts or justice. While its focus is erratic, it might be best described as a reflection on the media's exploitative chronicling of crashes between the filthy rich and the dirty underclass. According to the stunningly coiffed Domino, daughter of Laurence Harvey (glimpsed in a clip from The Manchurian Candidate) and a fashion model, here called Paulene (Jacqueline Bisset), she disdained the 90210 lifestyle early on, and, following her expulsion from college for breaking a sorority girl's nose, pursued bounty hunting.

After a churchy exhortation on the thrills of the job, Domino teams up with veteran Ed Moseby (Mickey Rourke), psycho killer Choco (Edgar Ramirez), and an Afghan refugee and explosives expert they call Alf (Riz Abbasi). She proves her worth by stopping a clusterfuck shootout with a gang by lap-dancing the leader. The scene splits into two possible outcomes, not so much suggesting alternate realities as hallucinatory confusion and the irrelevance of truth — maybe everyone died that day and maybe, as Domino likes to phrase it, the coin was flipped and she survived. (Quarters and dominos fall in overwrought slow-mo close-ups throughout the film.)

Subsequent successes lead to a reality show, The Bounty Squad, hosted by Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green (Domino stil unable to escape "that 90210 world") and produced by Christopher Walken's Mark. Things go very wrong while they're on a job for Claremont Williams III (Delroy Lindo); suffice it to say that stuff blows up and the TV camera, much like the one following the Knoxes in Killers, indicts you for watching. It's not news, but it is hectic, sensational and true enough.