Here's how Dominique opens: We see a Jeep with three Colombian men driving through the jungle, arriving at a crashed small airplane. They open the hatch and spy a large crate bound with chains, so lug it outside. One of them goes to investigate the pilot and finds a blonde woman inert at the controls, unconscious or dead. He notices her cleavage in a gratuitous closeup and begins to fondle her because oink. He then notices hundred dollar bills tucked under her clothing and pulls out a knife to cut her seatbelt off when to the surprise of no one, she awakes, snatches the knife from him and stabs him repeatedly, spraying blood all over the cockpit window and her. She then goes outside and whacks the other two men, taking their truck, burying the crate and heading into town. Alrightee then!
That's our introduction to the titular character played by Ukrainian-Scandanavian actress Oksana Orlan (more about how you haven't heard of her either later), so we're clearly in for some grindhouse antics. She goes to a bar where a middle-aged Amazonian blonde (she's 5'11") chugging tequila doesn't really blend in. A local, Julio (Sebastián Carvajal), introduces himself and she clearly takes a liking to him because she's immediately back at his place, having her way with him. (Grrrl Powah! Girls on top!)
The morning after, she discovers he's a local policeman when he puts on his uniform, but he leaves this woman whom he'd just met and boinked home to hang out with his very pregnant sister, her two kids, and his elderly wheelchair-bound father, while he goes to work for the exceedingly corrupt police Chief Santiago (Maurice Compte, Narcos), who uses the police as an army for the local cartel boss. But Julio is the One Good Cop and meets with an Internal Affairs officer to provide video evidence of the atrocities being committed only to learn the hard way the the cop cops are also corrupt and it ends very badly for him.
Santiago sends a half-dozen cops to get the laptop with the original files from the home, but Dominique kills them all. He them parlays with her, telling her that if she gives him the laptop that night, he'll spare Julio's family. Knowing that's a lie, she fortifies the home and lots of killy hijinks ensue.
Now I'm a fan of revenge flicks and hot kickass women kicking ass, so why am I giving Dominique a Skip It? To explain requires massive spoilers, so let me run down what sorta works first.
When the trailer for this arrived, looking like "female John Wick meets Desperado" I looked it up on IMDB and was puzzled why this movie even existed considering it has zero stars - the closest to a recognizable face is Compte who has a bunch of TV series credits - and Orlan's IMDB page's most recognizable past projects were 2005's xXx: State of the Union (the one with Ice Cube instead of Vin Diesel) where she played the uncredited Trophy Wife and Michael Bay's The Island where she was the uncredited Rich Woman. And also she's now 51-years-old.
Alright, so you have a middle-aged former model with almost no prior roles of note who looks a lot like Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and an exhibited acting range similar to Keanu Reeves (not that these roles require a ton of emoting). Perhaps the director/writer/editor Michael S. Ojeda is someone? Scanning his IMDB......annnnnd nope, nothing much except 20 episodes as a "recreations director" for a show called Deadliest Warrior which took the question of "Who would win a fight between Jesse James and Al Capone or Vlad the Impaler versus Sun Tzu?" and made a show of it.
However, he does have two relevant listings: First a direct-to-video thing called The Russian Bride which starred Orlan as, well, duh, mail-ordered by evil billionaire Corbin Bernsen and a short film called Rise of the Phoenix where Orlan starred as a woman named...wait for it...Dominique. This was made in 2015 and clearly was the demo reel to get the feature funded. Orlan is co-credited with coming up with the story so it's like Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman's collaboration creating The Bride for the Kill Bill films if you ordered from Temu.
So, is Ojeda a pulp grindhouse visionary or something? Not that Dominique indicates. He has a jittery handheld aesthetic that reminded me of Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi in its rawness and the story and execution of the action scenes is adequate for the caliber of the production this is.
But where it all goes wrong requires spoiling the ending, so if you're still down for a lean and mean low budget revenge action flick that will leave you angry at the end, go for it. It was riding a 5/10, Catch It On Streaming review until the end so perhaps you can overcome it.
But for the rest of you, SPOILERS BEGIN NOW:
After surviving the massive attack with the grandfather and oldest daughter's boyfriend catching some death, Dominque takes the sister, her newborn baby (who arrived during the battle after about 10 minutes of labor), and the other two children into the countryside to meet up with a kindly doctor who is waiting for them with an ambulance to transport them to safety far from this town. Everything looks hunky dory until the doctor is killed by a sniper and it's revealed the cartel had the rendezvous staked out. In the ensuing mayhem, everyone in the family is killed, even the newborn.
What. The. F*CK?!?!?
Earlier in the movie, Dominique explains that the only reason she's staying to defend the family of her one-night stand was, "I don't like when people die for no good reason." Um, HELLO?!?!? What would you call that ending, Mr. Ojeda?!?!? No, the fact you show the aftermath of her killing all the cartel members during the end credits doesn't make it better and if you thought you were launching a series off this movie, hooooo boy, no no no no NOOOOOOO!!!!
For all his evil-doing, you have to credit Harvey Weinstein for making a condition of releasing Clerks be that the original ending where Dante is murdered by a robber be cut. He understood that after all the wacky fun of this comedy, killing the poor guy who wasn't even supposed to be working that day would be commercial suicide, thus saving Kevin Smith from his own post-ironic stupidity. Too bad no one told Ojeda that killing children wasn't a winning move.
That's not to say that downbeat endings can't work. Leon doesn't make it out alive at the end of Leon: The Professional, but his death has meaning. This is just senseless shock.
END SPOILERS.
As for the 4K HDR presentation, it's not very effective as the low-budget cinematography is frequently blown out and generally flat. Looks more like Blu-ray quality which is fine for the material.
Dominique could've been a low-rent cheap thrill on top of a puzzlement as to why it was even made, but the unbelievably bad choice at the end just blows it.
Score: 4/10. Skip it.
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