Kiss Kiss Bang Bang July 17, 2006
Posted by jackal in : Films , trackbackOK, I watched this last week, and FWIW, a few thoughts (I’ve tried to avoid any big spoilers) ….
Firstly, I loved it. It’s a very knowing, darkly comic hybrid of detective thriller, neo-noir and buddy movie. Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is a petty thief from
New York who, through a daft coincidence, ends up in LA for a movie screentest. Once there, he finds himself working alongside Private Eye “Gay” Perry (Val Kilmer), to get some background for his movie role. But, on the same night Harry bumps into old flame Harmony (the lovely Michelle Monaghan), he and Perry also fish a dead body out of a car. In a lake. And that’s just the start of the trouble for our trio.
As much as I loved this movie, I can see how it might annoy, rather than amuse, if you don’t approach it in the right frame of mind. Writer/director Shane Black (LETHAL WEAPON, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT) has crafted a very clever film: it’s at once a deconstruction of detective / buddy movie clichés, and also a playful homage to those movies. Black turns the clichés in on themselves: Kilmer’s tough-as-nails private eye is gay; Downey Jr’s narration isn’t the typical hard-boiled noir voice-over: he addresses the viewer (”My name’s Harry Lockhart; I’ll be your narrator”), and screws up the chronology of his flashbacks (”And that’s how she got to the same party as me. Oh s**t! I skipped something, damn it.”). Harry, Perry and Harmony bumble their way through the murder mystery without a trace of Philip Marlowe’s cool ease (Harry discovers a body in his bathroom while taking care of business, and accidentally urinates over it – “can they get DNA off that?”)
This post-modern, tongue-in-cheek approach worked for me because the story is also so knowingly constructed. Harry and Harmony share a love for cheap pulp thrillers featuring a tough PI: “Johnny Gossamer would always take on 2 cases that were seemingly unrelated. One’s normal, and the other one’s, like, some wild s**t. Then you find out … that they’re connected. It’s all one case.” Black, of course, then has KKBB follow exactly this formula. It’s all very nudge-nudge, wink-wink, with title cards that refer back to
Chandler (DAY ONE: TROUBLE IS MY BUSINESS) and scenes that freeze frame so that Harry can explain stuff to the audience (“that … is a terrible scene – why was that in the movie? You think maybe it’ll COME BACK LATER?”). The dialogue is a riot throughout - I laughed out loud in several places, though admittedly it occasionally strained the comedy a bit too far (a brief subplot about a severed digit was too farcical for me).
It’s not true neo-noir, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a post-modern detective movie and a witty buddy movie, with a slice of romance, a lot of swearing, a few gunfights, a trio of great performances and (best of all) no CGI in sight. Two thumbs up from me.
Girl at party: “What do you do?”
Harry: “I’m retired. I invented dice.”
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