The Shane Black-a-than continues with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was the screenwriter’s 2005 directorial debut from his own script It’s stylishly directed and, as usual, his characters are all supernaturally adept at coming up with the wittiest retorts in the blink of an eye. Black’s dialogue verges on smug smart-assery, but stars Robert Downey Junior and Val Kilmer give awesome, career-resurrecting performances that really sell this stuff.
Here, Downey’s New York small-time hood Harry almost gets busted attempting to rob a toy store at Christmastime, maings his getaway, stumbling into the middle of an open casting audition for a Hollywood movie. Bursting with adrenaline and racked with guilt over the shooting of his accomplice, the movie people mistake all this for a raw improvisation and whisk him off to L.A where he’s paired up with Kilmer’s tough and very gay private eye ‘Gay’ Perry. Soon, they’re dragged into a very noir-ish Hollywood murder mystery.
I enjoy that, as with Lethal Weapon, this isn’t a film explicitly about Christmas but it ‘s always there in the background, adding some colour and festive spice. At a party, Harry meets old flame Harmony (Michelle Monaghan), now a struggling actress chasing the Hollywood dream. I love that during a scene where Harry (badly) tries to protect Harmony from the advances of a sleazy douchebag, I’m able to pick out that the movie being projected in the background is the Mexican oddity Santa Vs The Devil. If this quest has done anything for me, it’s certainly bumped up my Christmas movie trivia levels.
There’s a lot of stuff going on that seems very random involving drunk robots, corpses, dismembered fingers and mental patients but Black somehow manages to pull all this stuff together into something that eventually makes perfect sense.
Downey is eminently watchable in a fast-talking, cocky role while Monaghan brings an extra level of adorability to an intelligent, brassy character that could have been very one-note. But Kilmer is the M.V.P. here, effortlessly cool as the P.I. who takes Harry under his wing. ‘Gay’ Perry is the guy who (almost) always knows what to do and is too damned cool to allow anyone to give him shit for his sexuality. He also pulls off a neat trick to save the day involving a hidden revolver in a scene that pays homage to Black’s earlier Long Kiss Goodnight while also cleverly commenting on homophobia. Nice stuff.
There’s a whole bunch of fun Christmas tracks on the soundtrack and the running themes of redemption and second chances help to totally qualify this one as another smart, supercool alternative Christmas cracker.
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