Full disclosure: I watched this 2021 comedy solely because I know someone who was involved with the production. He informs me that the movie originally intended to be somewhat cerebral, a Spinal Tap/Best in Show-style mockumentary about a dominoes tournament in Compton. Traces of that film remain, but traces only.
What developed over multiple rewrites and three directors is a lowbrow and not especially good conventional comedy about the various characters involved in the tournament. David Arquette (who also produced) plays the conman in charge of the event. The humour (in a film with an interracial but predominantly African-American cast) leans heavily towards race-related jokes, and most of them aren't particularly funny.
Advertising trades heavily on the presence of Snoop Dogg, whose appearances throughout the film as a YouTube dominoes expert appear to have been filmed in one day. They consist of excerpts of his videos (which are pretty funny) and some narrative intrusions; he never appears nor interacts with the other characters. I suspect they wanted him to make an appearance near the finale, but that would have blown the film's budget.
Even more disconnected, we have actress/comedian Megan Sousa, the DJ who MCs the event. It's clear they just filmed her and dropped her bits into scenes, possibly as an afterthought, to beef up the humour. She's supposedly present throughout the tourney, but we never see her and anyone else in the same shot. She barely has the same lighting as anyone else. However, in a film as choppily edited as Domino, it doesn't matter too much.
Of course, we have the core characters. Pastor Steele (Baron Davis) is a pimp-turned-evangelical minister whose church rents the space for the event and expects to be paid. Players of the game include "Tenspeed" (Anthony "Scruncho" McKinley), who appears to have escaped from a 70s Blacksploitation flick, Big Slam (YouTuber Bigg Jah) a tough-guy domino champ on parole, Namita (Tasie Lawrence) a foreign-born woman trying to find her place in the American mosaic, and Camila (Valeria Vallejos), a woman challenging the expectations of her traditional family, among others.
The relationship between a curmudgeonly old Black man (Lou Beatty Jr.) and the Caucasian grandson (Nathan Dana) he's never met until now tries to be the emotional center of the film. That part of the story has real potential, as the initially mistrusting pair bond over the bones. Alas, there's not enough to make that plot fully work nor to justify the film's "feel-good" Hollywood ending.
I enjoyed the musical score.
In short, Domino: Battle of the Bones has some merit. It doubtless ranks as the best movie about playing dominoes in Compton made to date. It lacks enough merit, however, for me to recommend it to sober viewers.