Like some demon who appears in different guises throughout the ages, Tony Scott, the director of “Domino,” has produced cynical, violent entertainments perfectly suited to several eras – the Air Force recruitment reel “Top Gun” (1986), the totally ’90s “True Romance” (1993), and more recently his supreme summoning of the zeitgeist, last year’s “Man on Fire,” a post-9/11 “Dirty Harry” reply to the torture-shy.

If “Domino” captures something about the present moment, then we’re in trouble – or maybe we’re as dumb as we look. Freely based (or, more accurately, freebased) on the life story of Domino Harvey, a Beverly Hills princess turned bounty hunter, the film is a scrambled, flashy mess.

There’s nothing wrong with a good shoot ’em up, but few things are more tedious than a mediocre one that’s too eager to please. In most action movies, stuff gets blown up and the tough guy gets the girl. Here it’s two for one: The girl is the tough guy, a point the story is at pains to repeat.

The elfin Keira Knightley is Domino, a tomboy with bangs and a nunchaku who, after prudently essaying a modeling career, attends a seminar for bounty hunters. Her moxie impresses two of them, and soon she’s kicking down doors with the team of Ed (Mickey Rourke) and loco Choco (Edgar Ramirez). Her job, as declared in the native accent of the star of next month’s “Pride and Prejudice,” is to “kick ahhss.” Elizabeth Bennett, we hardly knew ye.

As a biopic “Domino” borrows little more from Harvey’s life than her odd combination of professions. The film, narrated in extended flashbacks from an interrogation, encompasses a bounty (almost incidentally),driver’s license forgeries, stolen casino loot, Mafia ties, various supporting players, and a $300,000 operation for a sick baby girl. The storytelling barely surpasses list form, requiring at several points the sad spectacle of an unironic dia grammed chart to explain things.

Visually, “Domino” eschews coherence for razzle-dazzle, but this is middle-aged flash, shot through with Oliver Stone fever-dream editing and supersaturated colors (for those graying temples). We’re everywhere and nowhere: A shootout face-off in a gang’s hideout ricochets between multiple angles and close-ups, slowing down enough only for Domino to lap dance her way out of trouble. A showdown in Las Vegas’s Stratosphere (a Seattle Space Needle knockoff) fractures into cross-cut mincemeat of red blurs and flash white-outs. Throughout, guitar licks and hip-hop riffs hustle and muscle us along. The cumulative feel resembles listening to shouting match between gunshots during a four-hour car chase.

Did I mention that, in another dash of Scottian topicality, Domino & Co. get picked up for a reality television show (hosted by Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green from “Beverly Hills 90210”), whose crew follows them around? Other cultural detritus here include the bizarre parody of a “Jerry Springer” episode that introduces the DMV agent (Mo’nique) who binds the plot and the many references to 2 Live Crew and Billy Ocean.

Then there’s Alf the mad Afghani bomber, Ed and Domino’s driver. A truly perplexing character that harks back to the “Airplane!”-era Middle Eastern parodies, Alf exists to blow things up and not speak English. This is Mr. Scott’s through-the-meat-grinder gesture to the Rest of the World, a character with the Pere Ubu nuttiness of an ’80s Godard extra.

Yet Mr. Scott’s push of B-movie exploitation into Hollywood slick means that “Domino” may one day reach a certain cult status. It has more than a few qualifications. There’s Mr. Rourke, sliming his way around Ms. Knightley, and, bless his heart, watching motel room porn. There’s the Severed Ear moment, which rewards us with the forbidden pleasures of titillating sadism: Here, a man’s arm is needlessly shot off for the safe combination tattooed on it. There’s the nutty cameo by Tom Waits as a disheveled gin-soaked gravel voiced prophet. And, lastly and crucially, they all take mescaline at the end.

And that’s the closest we get to the real Domino Harvey, who died of an apparent overdose this summer but whose addiction remains expressed only by the film’s style. Mr. Scott shows the real life Domino just before the credits standing at the foot of the Stratosphere – a laughing, cadaverous figure – shortly before cynically dedicating his undignified mess “in loving memory.”

***

In “Loggerheads,” the three strands of an involved adoption-triad drama are methodically chronicled in tandem, each set in its own year (1999 to 2001) and locale, with gradually intersecting privileged information. Mother, birth mother, and son undergo their separate realizations about love, shame, and memory, but all at the same disorientingly uniform and sedate pace.

Director Tim Kirkman seems to be aiming for the Quiet Understated Drama of this past spring’s “Winter Solstice,” and it is indeed laudably restrained, given the fraught material (though one story is set in Eden, North Carolina, and the birth mother is named Grace). But the piece is stricken by inert dialogue and limited acting technique (the actresses especially suffer from edge-of-tears lip-pursing and meaningful pauses). Camera work wavers between almost stagey reverses hot habits and obvious framing.

The best of the three stories follows the affable Kip Pardue as the articulate and hunky adoptee Mark. Thrown out of the house after getting caught kissing a high school chum, his story leaves him homeless but back in town to, of course, “save the turtles” (the titular loggerheads who return to their birthplace to mate). Maybe there’s a story in that. But for the best in Carolina Cinema, you’re better off looking for “Junebug” before it flies out of theaters (or just renting “Sherman’s March” again).