Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Shane Black |
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| Distributor | Warner Home Video |
| Honors | |
| In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a breezy take on writer-director Shane Black’s trademark buddy action/comedy oeuvre, a petty thief (Robert Downey Jr.) is brought to Los Angeles for an unlikely audition and finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation, along with his high school dream girl (Michelle Monaghan) and a detective (Val Kilmer) who has been training him for his upcoming role. | |
In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a breezy take on writer-director Shane Black’s trademark buddy action/comedy oeuvre, a petty thief (Robert Downey Jr.) is brought to Los Angeles for an unlikely audition and finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation, along with his high school dream girl (Michelle Monaghan) and a detective (Val Kilmer) who has been training him for his upcoming role.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
As a screenwriter, Shane Black made millions of dollars from screenplays for the big-budget action movies Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, among others. With his directing debut Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Black mocks and undercuts every cliche he once helped to invent. While fleeing from the cops, small time hood Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr., Wonder Boys) stumbles into an acting audition—and does so well he gets taken to Hollywood, where—pursuing a girl he loved in high school (foxy Michelle Monaghan, North Country)—he gets caught up in twisty murder mystery. His only chance of getting out alive is a private detective named Gay Perry (Val Kilmer, Wonderland, The Doors), who sidelights as a consultant for movies. No plot turn goes untweaked by Black’s clever, witty script, and Downey, Kilmer, and Monaghan clearly have a ball playing their screwball variations on action movie stereotypes. There’s nothing profound about Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, but it brings back wicked mischief to a genre that all often takes itself too seriously. —Bret Fetzer
Barnes and Noble
Veteran screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon 3 and 4) makes a commendable directorial debut with this playful faux-thriller, which has fun with the conventions of private-eye novels and film noir. Robert Downey Jr. stars (and narrates) as Harry Lockhart, a New York thief on the run who literally stumbles into a film audition and is “discovered,” earning a trip to L.A. for a screen test. Assigned to research his first role, as a detective, he tags along with Hollywood private eye Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), whose sharp tongue and matter-of-fact homosexuality contrasts amusingly with Harry’s voluble fish-out-of-water persona. A chance reunion with his high school dream girl, Harmony Faith Lane (Michele Monaghan), soon leads to murder, missing people, and shady dealings that that present us with a dizzying succession of zany characters and narrative complications. Loosely adapted from a whodunit written by the creator of the beloved shamus Michael Shayne, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (the title echoes a Pauline Kael collection of the same name) demands from its viewers a certain level of familiarity with classic detective novels and movies. For example, it’s broken up into five “chapters,” each of which bears the title of one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe yarns. The dialogue references countless other examples of the genre and, not surprisingly, seldom seems fully applicable to the scene at hand. No matter. This is the type of movie that’s not about the destination but about the journey. Downey and Kilmer, who work well together, obviously understood Black’s off-center vision. And their droll performances help enable him to hit the target, dead center. Ed Hulse
