KISS KISS BANG BANG WINK WINK, NUDGE NUDGE
Shane Black, get your elbow out of my ribs, I’m trying to watch a fucking movie!
Reviewed by Dylan Ferguson
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Directed by Shane Black
Now Playing
2.5 / 5
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the movie theatres, smart-assed post-modernism rears its ugly head again.
You may remember Shane Black (though it’s very excusable if you don’t) as the over-priced early-’90s screenwriter who penned Lethal Weapon. Well, he’s back with his directorial debut, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which gets its title from an expression, alternately accredited to movie critic Pauline Kael and James Bond, used to derisively describe the main appeal of movies. You know, you swoon at the kisses and gasp at the gunshots.
Well, in Black’s world, you’re supposed to snicker at both. His movie is an excuse for amoral comedy, ironic twists of screenplay convention, wink-wink Hollywood in-jokes and lots and lots of wise-cracks. Black is so determined to be cute, I’m surprised he didn’t just dress up in a fuzzy bunny rabbit costume and sing “I’m a little tea cup.”
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang benefits heavily from a pitch-perfect Robert Downey, Jr. as Harry Lockheart, a small-time crook who stumbles into a movie audition while trying to escape the cops. And, simply because these things can happen in movies, he so impresses the casting committee that they fly him into Los Angeles for a screen test. In L.A., the producers want him to learn the part of a private eye, so they get him to tag along with a real one — a gay one, played by deadpan Val Kilmer. His name’s Gay Perry. Get it? Huh? Get it?
Soon there is a real murder, but not before Harry meets Harmony (Michelle Monahan), a girl he had a crush on in grade school. When her little sister apparently commits suicide, Harmony comes to Harry for support, but he only stares at her tits.
Why? Because he’s insensitive? No, simply because the emotional stress Harmony feels doesn’t for a second concern the screenplay. It is only after the little sister’s death is connected to the earlier murder that Harry gives a shit, because now it has a point within the screenplay, and for the characters in this movie, the screenplay is God.
It’s a conscious decision by Black, as Downey’s manic narration makes clear, to have his characters exist in a purely fictional world, subservient to Black’s screenplay rather than reality or their own personal motivations. In this regard, the writing is often clever, though never brilliant.
There are a couple of brief instances where Black is actually bold enough to ask us to feel sympathy for his hero. That’s quite a lot to ask in a movie that systematically strips every bit of humanity and morality from every frame like they were some vile mould growing on the celluloid. Regardless, 99 per cent of the time he’s content to simply play around with gags involving corpses and detached fingers.
The barely-comprehensible story is intended as a send-up of pulp fiction novels and film noir, and it is separated into chapters called “Trouble is My Business,” “The Lady in the Lake,” “The Simple Art of Murder”. . . Get it? Huh? Chandler novels? Get it?
Of course, we’re not supposed to care that we’re watching a story that has fallen five stories from common sense and hangs by a fingernail to reason. We’re supposed to be too busy smirking.
Some people accused Quentin Tarantino of abandoning storytelling for pop culture references when he made the first volume of Kill Bill. I suppose he’s guilty of that, but the difference is Kill Bill was really damned entertaining. The events still occurred with a randomness suggesting a greater reality and a creativity that kept them amusing. Black’s writing is thick and stupid in comparison. He’d rather point out how vacant L.A.’s wannabe-actresses are than create a unique character.
This movie spends a lot of time kiss kissing up to industry-savvy Hollywooders, but the average filmgoer will get very little bang bang for his buck buck.
