Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, “Pride and Prejudice,” has had a lively afterlife in latter-day movies and on television. The not-bad 1940 film version, which starred Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, has been superseded in many people’s minds by the 1995 BBC TV rendition (it later aired here on A&E), which featured Jennifer Ehle as the restlessly marriageable Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as the persnickety Mr. Darcy, the object of her conflicted emotions. One scene in that five-hour series — of Darcy emerging all wet and sexy from a lake — pretty much made Firth an international star.

It certainly won the fictional heart — or at least the fictional loins — of the heroine of the 1996 best-seller, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” by Helen Fielding, who admitted that she nicked the plot for her book from the Austen classic. Naturally, she updated it for the age of snog-prone singles, and so we have Bridget, in one diary entry, referring to the Darcy and Elizabeth of the TV series as “my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship.”

Like Elizabeth, Bridget has a mother who’s trying to marry her off against her will — in Bridget’s case, to a stiff, stand-offish lawyer named … Mark Darcy. She doesn’t like this Darcy — he’s certainly no Colin Firth — and in recounting a conversation with one of her girlfriends, she says, “we had a long discussion about the comparative merits of Mr. Darcy and Mark Darcy, both agreeing that Mr. Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder, but that being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked.” Naturally, when “Bridget Jones’s Diary” was made into a movie in 2001, the actor chosen to play Mark Darcy actually was Colin Firth.

All of which is to say that “Pride and Prejudice” still appears to speak to something ageless in our emotional makeup, if not our social arrangements. The book comes down to us from a time when girls were thought to be not worth schooling and fit only for marriage and motherhood, with husbands to be chosen by their parents. And yet, the volatile trajectory of the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy, beginning in mutual dislike but blossoming into dewy-eyed, how-could-I-have-been-so-blind romance, is of course not unknown in our own day.

Thus the worthiness of the latest version of “Pride and Prejudice,” a movie starring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth and the English actor Matthew MacFadyen as Darcy. The director, English television veteran Joe Wright, has set the story more firmly in its time than was the case in the somewhat anachronistic 1940 film, and he’s shot it in a naturalistic, down-among-the-ducks-and-chickens style that leaves in all the backyard muck and the 300-pound pigs waddling about in the hallways of country houses. This is not a period piece in any sense that a 1940s set decorator would recognize.

Elizabeth Bennet is once again the second-oldest of five daughters in a good family that doesn’t have all that much money, and which must therefore ensure that the girls get married off to gentlemen of substantial means, or otherwise face financial and social ruin. (At the time, female offspring were not allowed to inherit property.) When a London bachelor, Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods), moves into a nearby mansion, in the occasional company of such impressive big-city friends as the fabulously wealthy Mr. Darcy, the Bennet girls’ mother (played by Brenda Blethyn) goes into matchmaking overdrive. Their father, meanwhile (played by Donald Sutherland with the exhausted amiability of a man who has clearly spent too many years in a house full of clamoring women), does his best to pay as little attention as possible to the proceedings, unless disaster of one sort or another clearly impends.

The story, although necessarily winnowed down from the novel, remains one of cleverly interwoven motives and giddy feminine calculations. Will the oldest of the Bennet girls, Jane (Rosamund Pike), land the attentive Mr. Bingley? Why does Mr. Darcy seem opposed to this? And why does he so dislike another sister’s suitor, Mr. Wickham — who in any case makes Darcy out to be a complete cad? Can Elizabeth escape the attentions of the fusty, lovelorn clergyman, Mr. Collins? And if she does, why should she give a toss about this Darcy character? And, most vexing question of all, why does she give a toss nevertheless?

The plot unfolds with automaton inevitability — there are a few surprises (for those unfamiliar with the book or the earlier films), but the ending is never in doubt.

So why should non-English majors have any interest in this sort of antique romance? Well, for one thing, because it actually is romantic, in a way that’s kind of charming in its absence of contemporary wisecracking worldliness. And because Keira Knightley, with her scrooched-up, toothy smile, and Matthew MacFadyen, with his pained good looks and endearing emotional constipation, make a pretty smashing couple, especially in full swoon out on the wind-blown heath. Also because, in the British manner, the secondary roles are played by actors of unusual accomplishment; and because the production is saved from sogginess by the astringent presence of Judi Dench, as the horrific matriarch, Lady Catherine de Bourg, and the increasingly ubiquitous Kelly Reilly as Mr. Bingley’s irrepressibly snotty sister, Caroline.

Also because, if I need mention, it’s a pretty great date movie.

Guaranteed you haven’t seen a movie like this in a while. Maybe not since that proudly preposterous slay-fest, “Natural Born Killers.” Or possibly even the original blood-gushing, bullet-riddled comedy-by-default, “Scarface.” This is like them, sort of, but definitely not like anything else.

An actual biopic about Domino Harvey would make a meaty action flick. It’d be about a movie star’s daughter and one-time fashion model who turned her back on wealth and glamour, became a butt-kicking, scum-pummeling L.A. bounty hunter and wound up OD-ing in a bathtub last June, at age 35, on the eve of a trial that could have put her away for 10 years for dealing methamphetamines. That’s some story. But for pyromaniacal director Tony Scott, it apparently wasn’t wild enough. He’s used Harvey’s life as the armature for his movie, but as he admits (in the first words flashed onscreen: “This is based on a true story … sort of”), he’s made a lot of it up.

In this, he had the valuable help of screenwriter Richard Kelly, the man who wrote and directed the wondrous-strange “Donnie Darko.” Kelly has packed “Domino” with more out-of-the-blue funny lines and insanely knotty plot permutations than a movie of this sort would ordinarily deserve, or bear. The cast is a cut above, too. Keira Knightley (”Pirates of the Caribbean”), the talented, 20-year-old English actress, plays Domino

	MTV Exclusive Clip: Guns Galore At 18th Street  Knightley, Xzibit, Suvari, More At The “Domino” Premiere

(who was also English). She’s game for the role, but her main function is to look super-cute in tight jeans, black leather and lethal armaments, smoking a lot and chewing gum very aggressively. The other actors, especially those who play her bounty-hunting associates, are more substantial. Mickey Rourke, who’s definitely back to stay, brings real heft and comic texture to the proceedings, as do the witty and wildly smoldering Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez and Scottish-Indian newcomer Rizwan Abbasi, who plays the team’s bomb-wielding Afghani van-driver.The picture opens with a blood-caked Domino telling a prim FBI psychologist (Lucy Liu) about her role in a just-failed $10-million armored-truck heist. The rest of the movie is told in careening flashbacks, amid much gunfire, many explosions and a soundtrack so boomingly hyperactive that even when there’s nothing blowing up onscreen, gigantic synth-rumblings fend off any hateful sonic void.

The plot is impossible to follow, but that’s okay — it’s not worth following. There’s an awful lot of it, though. We see the young Domino trying to cope with the divorce of her famous parents. (Mom was a Euro model; her father was the late actor Laurence Harvey, star of the 1962 “Manchurian Candidate.”) We see her being scarred for life by the death of a pet goldfish (which explains the goldfish tattoo we later glimpse on her neck). We see her starting nunchuk practice at age 12. We see her punching out a sorority sister in college, and then stomping a fellow fashion model in the middle of a runway show. (The real Domino claimed to have been employed by the Ford modeling agency, although execs there apparently have no memory of her.) Then we see her elbowing her way onto an L.A. bounty-hunting team run by a shady character named Claremont (Delroy Lindo, solid as always). She’s uniquely qualified for this work, it turns out — when her team bursts in on a room full of heavily armed South Central gangbangers, she breaks the ice by shedding her clothes and offering them a lap dance.

After being named Bounty Hunter of the Year in 2003, Domino and her partners are approached by a whack-job TV producer (Christopher Walken — perfect) who wants to feature them in a reality series to be called “The Bounty Squad,” hosted by two members of the totemic 1990s teen series “Beverly Hills, 90210″ (Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, pretty funny playing themselves). Soon, with camera crew and celebrity hosts in tow, Domino and the boys are kicking butt all over L.A. and, when they run out of kickable butt there, in Las Vegas, too. Cars screech and swerve down highways, runaway RVs fly through the air in flames and director Scott gooses it all along with an unending fusillade of film-tech flourishes that might embarrass even Oliver Stone: mad-fast cutting, blurry slo-mo, freeze frames, double-exposures, blown-out lighting, hyper-saturated color. There’s not one dull moment in the whole film, if by “dull” you mean any scene in which people simply talk.

What talk there is amid the din ranges from “Showgirls”-style arch-moronic (Domino sizing up Rourke: “He lost a toe in a prison riot — the man is a warrior”) to surprisingly wry (when Rourke’s viewing of a motel porn film is interrupted by someone bashing a chair through the TV screen, he says, “I just paid twelve-ninety-five for that movie — I wanna see how it ends”). There’s also the priceless, quasi-lesbian moment when Domino, profiling her neck tattoo for Lucy Liu, says, in a sultry murmur, “You’ve been staring at my goldfish all afternoon.”

I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree that this is a ridiculous movie. But is it fun-ridiculous, like “Scarface”? Might it go on to become a cult item? I suspect not. Cult movies are pictures whose enormously nonsensical qualities can be savored over and over again. It’s hard to imagine a lot of people wanting to sit through the way-over-amped and mind-numbingly action-crammed “Domino” a second time. Or maybe even a first — Monday’s box-office stats will tell that tale

Reinventing the image of 20-year-old, swizzle-stick-thin women everywhere, actress Keira Knightley becomes the living personification of the word “badass” in “Domino,” in which she whacks more behinds than a hospital delivery-room physician.

In this exclusive clip, Knightley (as the titular fashion model turned-bounty-hunter) and deadly co-workers Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez) get into a “True Romance”-type standoff with the real-life 18th Street Gang, playing themselves.

As you’re watching the scene, feel free to search for any indication of Knightley’s genuine hatred of firearms — and the actress’ skill at keeping it concealed. “Machine guns absolutely freaked me out,” she revealed recently. “I burst into tears the first time I shot it, because I had two of them and [people should only hold one at a time], and I had one in each hand and the force knocked me over. So I basically completely lost control. We had blanks in them, not live rounds, but even so, it freaked me out so that I burst into tears.”

“When we actually came to do the scene, I was meant to jump up and [director] Tony [Scott] shouted ‘Action!’ and my knees locked, and I just physically couldn’t make myself stand up. And so he just said, ‘Listen, I’ll shout action, and you start screaming, and I guarantee you’ll be able to do it if you start to scream a lot.’ And he was right, so there you go. But I still didn’t like them.”

Knightley, Rourke, Ramirez and the “Domino” supporting cast of random notables including Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken, Macy Gray and the dynamic duo of “90210″ alums Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering arrive in theaters October 14.

For a full-length feature on “Domino,” see “Keira Knightley Scarred On Set Of ‘Domino,’ And Proud Of It.”

Just days after playing the genteel, beautiful Elizabeth Bennet, Keira Knightley slipped out of her Jane Austen frock, submitted her tresses to a savage pair of scissors and became a shotgun-wielding bounty hunter.

This transformation from quick-witted 18th century gal to Los Angeles wild woman is now to be revealed, with the October release of Domino, a film about the Belgravia-born model turned bounty hunter Domino Harvey.

The release follows Knightley’s pert portrayal of the lead character in Pride & Prejudice, in cinemas now, a film which she completed only four days before beginning Domino.

In the film, which comes only three months after Domino Harvey, the daughter of the British actor Laurence Harvey, died in her West Hollywood bath aged 35, the British actress uses shotguns, breaks a girl’s nose with her fist and offers a lap dance to a pistol-wielding fugitive. She is directed by Newcastle-born Tony Scott, who knew Harvey.

Just what Harvey would have made of the movie is uncertain. Her mother, the 1960s Vogue model Paulene Stone, played by Jacqueline Bisset in the film, was quoted as saying that she wanted “absolutely nothing to do with the film”, possibly because the plot for the £30 million picture, which also stars Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken, is invention. It centres on a reality show and $10 million confidence trick against the Mafia. Knightley, 20, is the first to admit it is a product of the imagination. She said it is “a Tony Scott extravaganza-action-black comedy that is completely fictitious”.

Keira Knightley looked like she could kick my ass on the set of Domino. Of course, she looked like she could’ve kicked my ass in Bend it Like Beckham too. Let’s just say in Beckham, she would have winded me and damaged my spleen, but now she’d rip myneck clean off. Domino is based on a true story, so Knightley has to look like a real bounty hunter, even though she admits the real Domino Harvey looks nothing like her. But Harvey gave up Hollywood and modeling for the life of the hunt, and in the film version, she ends up on a reality TV series for it.
In between complicated setups (Tony Scott was configuring three cameras on the balcony of a hotel room), Knightley breezed by the press to discuss her latest kick-ass role. With cropped hair dyed blonde in the front and almost army-like costume, Knightley no longer looked like Natalie Portman. Now she looked like Natalie Portman and Linda Hamilton’s love child.

Q: Are you doing your own stunts in this movie?
Keira: Yeah. It’s worked out that way. I thought that actually I wasn’t going to do as many as I normally like to because I didn’t have the chance beforehand to do as much training as I would because I came straight from another film. But as we’ve gone on, I’ve been doing more and more. So it’s been great fun. It’s been really good. I’ve got to tell you how I got this [wound] though. I was shooting two machine guns. It was fantastic. I had a machine gun in each hand, and one of the shells from the machine gun jumped out the back and hit me right there. I didn’t know until afterwards. I went home and had a shower and I had fake blood all over me and suddenly something wouldn’t come off. It’s a fabulous burn. I’m very proud of it because everyone looks at it and goes, “Wow, what happened?” I go, “A machine gun.”

Q: How do you like the look of this character?
Keira: I like it. I like it a lot. I’m very glad to wipe the tattoos off at the end of the day, but it’s quite nice to have them. But no, I’m enjoying her. You mean the hair too, right?

Q: The hair, the outfit, everything.
Keira: Just everything. I really like it.

Q: Did you come right from doing Pride and Prejudice? Keira: Yeah. I had four days in between. I didn’t realize that it was going to be as difficult as it was to make the transition. But it was actually really, really, really strange. It was really strange. If I’d had a whole week, it might not have been. But just trying to change that quickly from one character to the other and them being so different was difficult, but good. That’s what it’s all about. So it was good.

Q: What kind of weapons have you been training on?
Keira: Nun-chucks was the big one. Guns. I think that I do a couple of knife throws or one knife throw. And I’m just punching people in the face really.

Q: Have you gotten proficient with the nun-chucks?
Keira: I’m alright. I’m okay. I can’t really do it with both hands. Like, my left hand isn’t as good as I’m right, and if you’re a proper nun-chuck person, you should be as good on both hands. I’m not. I’m okay. It could’ve been better, but it could’ve been a hell of a lot worse. So I’m quite proud of myself.

Q: What sold you on doing this movie?
Keira: Tony. I mean, I read the script. That must’ve been back in March, I think, and then I flew over to L.A. to meet Tony in April. I mean, the moment that I read the script, I thought, “This is so cool.” It’s really a black comedy. It’s a black, black, black comedy, really dark and nasty and all the rest of it. But there’s something about it, you read it and you’re just completely swept up in it. At that point I didn’t know that I was doing Pride and Prejudice and I got a real kick out of the idea of going from Elizabeth Bennett to Domino. I think that the whole concept of the story, the whole idea of this girl who’s from an extremely privileged background who completely turns her back on all of it and goes off on this wild path is an extraordinary idea in itself. Then there’s the fact that a lot of it, it is based on reality. That’s fascinating. So I just thought that the whole thing was amazing. Then I came out here and I met Tony Scott and he’s just incredible, a total inspiration. You know that because most of his crew has been working with him for ten or fifteen years. And that doesn’t happen unless they completely adore him and they do completely adore him. You walk on set and it’s just such a great atmosphere and it’s lovely to be a part of that.

Q: Did you get to meet her?
Keira: I did very briefly once way before we started filming. And originally, I kind of thought that it’d be really interesting to just play her totally and I’d do the voice and I’d do everything. Then I sort of met her and heard all her stories which were amazing, but although this is totally inspired by her and by her character, it isn’t true to her story. So I sort of thought, “Okay, well, seeing as we’re not completely telling her story, it gives me a sort of freedom to actually do what I want.” So I met her once and she was an extraordinary woman, really amazing and it was fantastic meeting her. She’s very intelligent and just incredible.

Q: Did you get anything from her that you’re using in the film?
Keira: Well, because I didn’t have much time before I started they really kindly gave me a lot of tapes and things like that. It was just of her speaking and everything and no, I haven’t taken any of it. But it was just great to listen to it and be acquainted with it and have that in the back of my head. It was just fascinating to hear her talk about the decisions that she made which was definitely what helped within the character as opposed to any physical resemblance or the voice being the same or something which it isn’t. Actually, what was interesting, she’s lived over here I think since she was about eight and she’s totally English. I sort of expected right at the start that it would be an American accent because she’s been over here so long. But it actually isn’t. It’s English. So I thought, “Well, I’ll keep my own accent.” That’s fine.

Q: How different does she look from you physically?
Keira: Well, you know, we just don’t look that similar. It’s that simple. She’s quite a bit taller than me.

Q: Are you working on a big stunt today?
Keira: No, we’re not. It’s just dialogue today.

Q: Are there any more big stunt days left?
Keira: I don’t think so. Yes, okay, we’re flipping a Winnebago. We’ve done the interior of that already. Somebody drugs us with mescaline and then we’re riding in a Winnebago which is obviously not a good idea if you’re high on mescaline, so the thing flips, Winnebago flips, crashes. So I think we’ve got a lot to do with that. We’ve done most of the final shootout kind of thing, but I think we’ve still got a bit more of that to do so there’s little bits and pieces all over the place.

Q: What is it like working with Mickey Rourke?
Keira: I love him. He’s amazing. It’s been really good. He’s such a talented actor, so talented, so that’s been amazing just watching him. I think he’s great. We’ve had such a laugh. He’s been truly great so it’s been a lovely experience.

Q: Are you stuck in the Winnebago for long?
Keira: Well, they built the interior of the Winnebago on the stage at LA Center Studios on a gimble. So it basically means that it flips totally. And it was extraordinary because it did do 360 degrees. They did that with the stunt doubles. We didn’t do that. We only did 180 degrees and that was enough actually. It was great. It was like being on an extreme kind of ride. It was extraordinary, flipping around the place, so that was amazing but we did do a lot in a Winnebago. There’s a lot of scenes within this kind of crazy, painted amazing Winnebago. So we have been driving up and down the roads endlessly without getting to go to the toilet which has been quite interesting but good.

Q: Have you had a special workout for the film?
Keira: No. No. No, not at all actually. I mean, because I was doing Pride and Prejudice, I did have a trainer towards the end of that to try and get me ready for this. But we were kind of working sort of 14 hour days straight and then I was trying to do a tiny bit of training either at the end of the day or before I went to work at about five thirty in the morning. So I didn’t really get to do very much at all. Then doing this, I haven’t trained once. So, no. No, there hasn’t been anything. There’s been a lot of coffee I guess.

Q: You mentioned hearing some of Domino’s life stories?
Keira: Well, yeah, they’d done an interview with her and on the recording she talked about a lot of that.

Q: Are there things in the movie that people would be shocked to know were true?
Keira: I can’t think of anything. I mean, the movie is shocking. It’s a shocking film. It’s going to, I mean, it’s very violent. There is sex, violence, nudity and bad language. So I’m pretty sure that it gets you on all fronts. I don’t know specifically what’s true and what isn’t. I can say that totally honestly. I think that a lot of it is inspired by truth with a lot of artistic license along the way. So who knows, and I think that’s the beauty of film in general. It’s a mystery.

Q: Where does the film’s sex appeal come from?
Keira: Sex appeal? There’s nudity. We do a lot of stuff in strip clubs, right? Not particularly me, but yeah, I had my first strip club experience which was great. There’s a lot of interesting things that you’ll have to wait and see.

Q: What are you doing after Domino?
Keira: It’s looking like a Pirates [of the Caribbean] sequel, I think. Yes.

Q: Can you talk about that?
Keira: You probably know way more than me. I know nothing.

Q: When will it start shooting?
Keira: I don’t know actually, sometime in the spring.

Q: So you’ll have a break?
Keira: Probably not. [Publicist interjects, end of February start date,] The end of February it goes. There you go.

Q: But you’ve signed officially?
Keira: Have I signed officially? Yes.

Q: For one or two sequels? Keira: I don’t know. I’m not sure.