When Jude Law is peeling the paint off the walls with his intense recital of writer-director Richard Shepard’s fabulous and filthy monologues, Dom Hemingway is mesmerizing. The plot does not live up to the promise of the many great individual scenes, but those scenes! The plot – involving bank robbers, car crashes, murderous madmen and family drama – is convoluted and a bit tonally confusing. The bloody, somewhat slapstick crime story feels like it came from a Guy Ritchie film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, while the family drama about regret and redemption seem to have been culled from something like Love Actually. Dom Hemingway is a lot of fun. Most of this, of course, is because Law gives his best performance in more than ten years and the funniest of his career. He put on thirty pounds (drinking ten Cokes a day), and it looks very, very good on his familiar lither frame.
