Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

The first point of reference for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is that the title takes a nod towards an old book of collected film criticism by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael (whose byline still turns up sometimes in the potted summaries at the front of the magazine, showing the dead live on in strange ways).

The second riff that tells you it’s gunna be a showbiz orgy is an amusing pre title sequence which offers up a couple of small town kids doing a re-working of the old magician chain sawing up a girl in the box.

Then, after a snappy retro set of animated credits, a kind of update on what was going down in the sixties, we’re into an abundance of in jokes, gags, private eye send ups, Hollywood side swipes, and references to Raymond Chandler books (his titles are used on cards between scenes). You could imagine the grand old writer sitting down with a whiskey in hand (with maybe Horace McCoy and David Goodis for company) to watch the show, and after the first reel, saying what the f?

That’s because any connection between this show and real hardboiled detective fiction is pretty attenuated, though writer director Shane Black (adapting Brett Halliday’s novel in part) makes plenty of visual and verbal references to a pulp pot boiler private dick hero and his books (one title just happens to be the same as Halliday’s novel – Bodies Are Where You Find Them).

What you get instead is a rollercoaster ride along with the requisite completely incomprehensible plot, and alongside the jokes, plenty of action and bodies, done in economical forties Warner Bros style.

Robert Downey Jr. here shows the benefit of his bad boy times, because he delivers his lines screwball comedy style, at a rat a tat machine gun pace, as if sustained by a heavy infusion of speed or coke. He plays a relatively innocent New York thief, who flees a crime scene only to get into an audition, delivers a stunning method try out, and finds himself shipped across to the darkest, maddest west, namely LA (it turns out it’s only a ploy to get Colin Farrell for a cheaper price).

Somehow Downey hooks up with Val Kilmer, also wired for speed, playing a gay detective, who is determined to work out the plot while delivering fag hag jokes to all and sundry.

It also helps male viewers that Michelle Monaghan is on hand to play the heroine (dubbed Harmony Faith), a small town girl who finds herself in the big city and attracted to Downey. She’s a knockout in more ways than one.

The plot involves sisters and incest and the wrong side of town, and is completely inexplicable. However it does allow for plenty of jokes – Downey manages to lose a finger, a car crashes into a lake with a body in the trunk, Downey is allowed to swing above a freeway by the hand of a dead girl as it dangles from the coffin, baddies get popped, and the goodies get popped as well, and when there’s a killing, there’s a moment of grieving before the action gets going again.

There’s a fascination with guns and sex, and in one memorable scene, Downey upstages the cat and the ashes by urinating on a corpse (and worrying about his DNA). It won’t be to everyone’s taste – a dog takes a view on Downey’s detached finger – but it’s a fun ride if you like the determinedly eccentric.

There’s also plenty of parties referencing corrupt Hollywood decadence, and plenty of baddies who get taken apart one way or another, in generally less than credible fashion (no spoilers but Downey manages to collect a gun while swinging from the dead girl’s hand).

And it’s probably worth mentioning again that there are more than enough tit and bum and gay boy jokes to offend the politically correct – though the constant narration provided by Downey apologises for saying fuck too many times to any mid Westerners who might have strayed into the cinema.

There’s a special irony in all this. Black is the man responsible for the Lethal Weapon series, along with The Last Boy Scout and Last Action Hero, two nineties turkeys that clearly warped his mind about Hollywood, but at last has paid off with a fun pay out.

Sure half the jokes misfire, and at odd times the fireworks splutter, and there are lulls in the action, but there’s more than enough snappiness and savvy at work here to please retro referential buffs who spend way too much time in darkened rooms.

It’s payback time for Black about the rules and about the way movies are put together, with the narration constantly chiding viewers about how well they’re following the story and how dumb the conventions of Hollywood movie making can be (Black even allows his boys to do a sayonara sign off, while he must have relished each chance he had to pay off studio execs for interfering in the storyline).

The studio of course had the last laugh, dumping the show out into the theatres and now releasing it on DVD as a vanilla exercise (sans extras). The only redeeming feature of the disc is the way the bright palette deployed by Black and his DOP makes it up onto the goggle box, including cheeky post tricks that show LA drowning in a cloud of yellow smog.

Moral: if you kick Hollywood ass, Hollywood kicks your ass. But that’s the moral of Black’s fun story, so it’s really only the QED coda you’d expect.

Frankly it’s a relief to find signs of life and intelligence in this quirky film, showing Black, if left to his own devices, has a real sense of timing, pace and fun.

It’s a refined taste – just listing al the in jokes could take a half dozen pages – and it won’t please the klutzes who prefer to pull a copy of Stealth down from the shelf for a night of popcorn corn.

But if you want to see just why everybody loves bad boy Downey, here he is at last in some kind of form, and he even gets to sing (sort of) the end title track. After his own equally dire recent track record Kilmer gets to shine. And did I mention Monaghan at least three times? There’s more than a hint of Bacall about her on screen charm and presence. The baddies are as good as steely eyed, ultimately inept baddies can be (there’s a Mr. Frying Pan and a Mr Fire and a Mr Mustard and so on and on) but this is really a cute buddie flick well worth an outing in your home. Feminists and anti rreferentialist modernists should stand well clear.

As the grand old writer said, Los Angeles has all the personality of a paper cup, and here it’s triumphantly on show in all its glory. Don Simpson would’ve been proud. In parts I cacked myself, and that might not be a term in the usual critical lexicon, but if you can’t have fun with this show, you should join the corpses regularly on view.

 

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