Add The Domino Principle (1977) to the list of throwback obscurities I watched so you don’t have to. This brightly lit conspiracy thriller from director Stanley Kramer emits an air of knowing portentousness, but is so muddy in its narrative mission that it ultimately feels like it isn’t about anything.
Roy Tucker (Gene Hackman) is an inmate at San Quentin who, though he swears by his innocence, carries himself like the dangerous convicted murderer he isn’t. He does have a pedigree for killing, though, having served in Viet Nam as a crack shot in a search-and-destroy unit. This makes Tucker a person of interest to inscrutable fixer Marvin Tagge (Richard Widmark), who attempts to recruit Tucker on an operation by releasing him from prison and reuniting him with his wife Elise (Candice Bergen). While initialing resisting the lure, Tucker eventually does fall in with Tagge and his cryptic associates, but when they start steering him toward a political assassination, it quickly becomes clear that his decisions are not his own.
The Domino Principle possesses elements that look appealing at a glance: a neo-noir, post-Watergate tone, a thriller plot that manipulates a rogue antihero into conflict with a nebulous cadre of world-controlling villains, brightly shot cinematography, location work to spotlight the international intrigue. For all that, it fails to find its story, steering an unlikable protagonist and his pro forma love interest into a trap that is never satisfyingly explained, but also somehow easy to see coming. The basic idea of Adam Kennedy’s script (adapted from his own novel) is a cynical take on the cruel systems that control everything: “the world is a machine and we’re all its cogs,” a message most interestingly realized in the character of Ross Pine (Edward Albert), a young, cerebral mastermind who comes across like a sociopathic Jim Phelps. But there’s where the interest stops, because the plot lacks both intricacy and coherence, and the ending — which appears to be aiming for the tragic, hard-hitting impact of something like The Parallax View — instead lands with a muzzy whimper of punchless ambiguity.
