Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang Review
by [email protected] (webmaster AT themovieaddict DOT com)July 10th, 2006
KISS KISS, BANG BANG
Year: 2005
Rating: R (sex & language)
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer
Director: Shane Black
Writer: Shane Black
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Review by The Movie Addict
http://www.themovieaddict.com/reviews/kiss_kiss_bang_bang.html
"To all you good people in the Midwest, sorry we said 'f**k' so much. "
You've gotta hand it to Shane Black. This is the man who helped create the cop-buddy genre with "Lethal Weapon," then turned around four years later and satirized it with his script for "The Last Boy Scout." A lot of critics didn't like that movie because it was loud, ugly, profane, garish and Tony Scott-ish. But a lot of them simply didn't understand it.
Ditto for "Last Action Hero." It's one of the most daring and original Hollywood films ever produced, and yet somehow many of its stars didn't even appreciate it. Arnold signed on thinking it was just another action flick with some tongue-in-cheek humor (as evidenced by his later comments about the film being "too violent" for kids). But that movie had a lot of brains, and it consistently made fun of the high level of cartoonish violence in any Arnie movie. And when "The Long Kiss Goodnight" rolled around, that is when Black proved once and for all that although his films may contain a surface of male machismo, misogyny, over-the-top violence and profanity, it's his clever writing that always undermines what's happening in the forefront. He's serving Hollywood exactly what they want, while still managing to take jabs at them underneath it all. He took the whole spy-thriller genre for a big twist, but once again a lot of people just didn't "get it" - and it was another bomb. It shoved him into unwilling retirement.
Now, Shane is black with his directorial debut, "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," one of the best films I've ever seen. Entertaining from frame one, this gritty, smug little film carries over a lot of the unadulterated heavy violence and sexism inherent in so many action films from the 1980s and early 1990s. But it's all poking fun at itself, in typical Shane fashion. Take the scene where the heroine, Harmony Lane (Michelle Monaghan), runs around a Los Angeles park in a skimpy Playboy outfit, for example. Shane even gives her a gun. Kiss kiss, bang bang.
Robert Downey, Jr. plays Harry Lockhart, a small-time crook from the east coast who gets his partner killed in a toy store robbery and, on the run from cops, stumbles into an open casting audition. He breaks down in an emotional fit in front of the casting director, who thinks it's the best performance he's ever seen. He flies Harry out to LA to prepare for his role in the film, where he meets Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), a gay Hollywood insider who is a private eye of sorts and is also gay. Did I mention he's gay? Because it's made clear that he is. A lot. And in case you didn't get it the first time, they even gave him a Gay nickname. Literally.
But that's the genius of this movie. Kilmer embodies Perry so well that he ends up transforming his character into a giant criticism of gay stereotypes. Perry is a stereotype who is aware of his stereotypes, and embraces them, and makes fun of them - and isn't afraid too, which makes it acceptable for us to laugh. Perry is even, to a point, another means to satirize Black's earlier material. Riggs and Murtaugh solidified the idea of buddies in a buddy-movie - what they should be like, how they should interact, and so on and so forth. To suddenly have a buddy movie with a straight character and a gay character almost seems to be breaking the unwritten Buddy Movie laws that Black helped create.
Perry is one of Kilmer's best and most likable performances, and he plays right into the hands of the wonderful Robert Downey Jr., who is a true revelation. His comedic timing and fourth wall narrative are flawless. His interaction with Kilmer is classic, and one of the best buddy-pairings since "Lethal Weapon." Go figure. It almost makes you crave for a sequel, even though you really don't want to risk them ruining the originality of the original.
"Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is the most obvious of all Shane's self-referential films, because it speaks directly to its audience. ("I saw the last Lord of the Rings, I'm not going to have like seventeen different endings.") But balancing a self-referential narrative in a film like this almost seems a risky thing to do in the post-Tarantino era - the era in which self-reference became "hip" and "cool," but most importantly: financially profitable for the studios. The production companies dished them out and soon the entire concept was burnt out and boring. The smug, self-aware attitude of flicks like "Boondock Saints" became tiresome. But it's only fitting that the father of the genre should be the one to resurrect it.
This film has the best dialogue I've heard in a movie for ages, and the brilliance of it is the fact that it doesn't become overbearingly self-conscious: it's amiable and entertaining.
The film's title is a reference to another movie, by the way. Pauline Kael supposedly saw the term in Italy, where it was used to describe the James Bond character. It effectively sums up exactly what Hollywood wants in their movies - girls, sex, violence. Kiss kiss, bang bang. Black is back.
http://www.themovieaddict.com/contact.html for feedback.
More on 'Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
