When spoilt little It Girls rebel against their well-heeled parents it doesn't normally get much riskier than falling over in Chinawhite.

They don't, for instance, tend to launch a career tooling themselves up, kicking down doors and pursuing crimmos for cash.

Domino Harvey (Knightley) is different. A born rebel, she always railed against convention and when her father - actor Lawrence Harvey - dies her mum can't contain her.

A fully-fledged teenage delinquent with a bad nanchuk habit, she signs up (as you do in LA) as a bail recovery agent. A bounty hunter to you and me.

She's recruited into the ranks of a bail bond team made up of ex-con Ed (Rourke) - "the father I never had" - and smouldering latino hunk Choco (Ramirez).

Pretty soon the gang - boasting the professional acumen of The Magnificent Seven married to social attitude of The Sex Pistols - are creating headlines and attract the eye of reality TV producer Mark Heiss (Hollywood's loon-in-chief Chris Walken).

However, a duplicitous bit of double booking by their bail bondsman Claremont (Lindo) sees them getting out of their depth with the Mob.

Director Tony Scott - who acted as a surrogate father to the real Harvey - appears to have pinched a plot from Quentin Tarantino... and then completely lost it.

The biggest problem is the casting of Knightley to deliver lines like "my agenda is to kick ass and secure the bounty" in an accent more Sloane Square than South Central LA.

Which brings us onto the dialogue, a wince-inducing feast of gung-ho hellraising and California psychobabble (you can tell things are bad when Tom Waits is wheeled out to spout a nonsensical sermon and then just disappears).

The one comic highspot is a scene featuring America's youngest grandmother suggesting to Jerry Springer's audience that racial typcasting should be fine-tuned to include the terms chinegro and blacktino.

And Scott's trademark action setpieces - a torched Winnebago balletically tossed into the sky - are there even if his sure touch with the storyline appears to have deserted him.

"I know in my heart of hearts we should have stopped when my goldfish died," says Knightley. "It was a sign from a higher power."

Amen to that.

Tim Evans.