The one thing you can always say about a movie written by Shane Black is that he knows how to make an outrageous story believable and fun to watch. His friend and sometimes collaborator Fred Dekker said the Transylvania castle opening of The Monster Squad was written by Black as a full-blown siege with Dr. Abraham Van Helsing and the vampire hunters in a Zeppelin. But the movie’s budget prohibited all that.
Black is one of those writers who can make something work even though he seems like he’s a 12-year-old boy play commando in the backyard with sticks and pinecones. After the meager reception on the awesomely underrated The Long Kiss Goodbye in 1996, he went dormant for almost a decade before returning with the criminally underrated and somewhat forgotten Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
With Val Kilmer’s recent death, this might have been one of his last great performances before his illness and health changed his career paths. Kilmer plays “Gay” Perry van Shrike, a private investigator in the L.A. area hired to give some technical advise to Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), a petty criminal who’s earned a screen test in Hollywood.
In New York City, Harry was running from the cops after a botched burglary resulting in his friend getting shot. He takes shelter in an office room where casting director Dabney Shaw (Larry Miller) and others are holding auditions. Confused, Harry reads the script but realizes the dialogue mirrors what just happened. He breaks down crying over his friend’s death and Dabney and the others are impressed.
Harry meets Perry at a Hollywood party thrown by Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen) a shady retired actor. His childhood crush, Harmony Lane (Michelle Monaghan), is also there. What happens from here I can’t tell, but it’s a complicated and outrageous story that you have to pay close attention to and watch again or else, you’ll be lost.
At this point in their respective careers, Downey and Kilmer were kind of desperate for any work they could get. Kilmer’s behavior on productions had some directors and actors refusing not to work with him. And Downey was still a hard sell for many movies mainly for his arrests around the Y2K era that had him in and out of jails and prison. So, a movie like this is one of those flicks where a lot of actors can pretty much do whatever the hell they want because it’s isn’t going to hurt their careers.
Bernsen, himself, was mostly appearing in low-budget movies and on TV at the time. There’s a hilarious reference to actor Michael Beck (The Warriors and Xanadu) who worked with Dexter on a previous movie. They’ve even cut younger clips of both Beck and Bernsen into a fake movie.
Black based this movie on the hard-boiled novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them which was published in 1941. Yet, he frames the movie around a parody of the neo-noir crime thriller that walks the fine line between absurd and serious. This is a movie where Harmony gets a job as in a beer commercial with a poorly CGI bear. Black’s intent is to show how Hollywood takes itself too seriously.
There’s a reference to a fake movie called Protocop, which is intended to parody RoboCop. Black appeared in the third movie which was directed and co-written by Dekker. There’s even some reports Black did some uncredited rewrites on that movie. But the suit looks similar to the War Machine suit that would be shown in the Iron Man movies and other MCU flicks. This was released in 2005 before Downey was hired to play Tony Stark/Iron Man.
He would appear in the horrible remake The Shaggy Dog alongside Tim Allen in 2006 so playing some schlub who is down on his luck seems perfect. Downey seems to enjoy trying to act like the tough-as-nail PI as Vilmer’s Perry is a far more experienced and serious person. They have great chemistry together as does Downey with Monaghan who plays Harmony as someone who isn’t dumb but she’s can be too scatterbrain at times. Regardless, she doesn’t take crap off anyone.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came and went in 2005 without much fanfare as did a lot of movies from this era. It divided critics but it is enjoyable and watchable. If anything else, it’s a reminder of how good Kilmer could be on screen when his ego wasn’t getting in the way.
It will probably be the only time we get an Iron Man/Batman cross-over.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 