Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang review

Make that three kisses: one kiss of life to each of the ailing careers resuscitated by this offbeat fun thriller. Writer/director Shane Black, along with stars Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer have, for various reasons, seen their once stellar careers take a downward slide of late, but Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang will take a giant step towards redressing that decline. Black, who at 23 became the wunderkind of Hollywood with his Lethal Weapon script, has returned with some panache to the buddy action genre he once ruled.

Downey and Kilmer are brilliantly matched as the oil and water pairing of Harry Lockhart, a charming bumbling petty thief and Perry Van Shrike, a tough, dour private eye whose homosexuality has led him to be better known as Gay Perry. Their biting exchanges are underscored with a tenderness that makes the couple a memorable cinematic double act.

Kiss Kiss is full of quirky moments, from Harry's nonchalant introduction, "I'll be your narrator," through the depiction of how he went from a career in larceny to one as an aspiring actor in Hollywood, to the point where he stops the action mid frame to correct his errant storytelling. Black plays as much with language as he does with convention. It's why in the midst of what is essentially a film in the vein of a hard-boiled novel, the characters start arguing about grammatical syntax.

Kiss Kiss' noirish mood spreads beyond Michael Barrett's stylish photography to the plot, which is interspersed with references to Jonny Gossamer, the private detective hero of a series of old pulp fiction novels. Convoluted to the point where Harry feels the need to check with the audience that they're keeping up, the story centers on a pair of seemingly unconnected deaths.

Paired together when Perry is hired to prepare Harry for a screen test, the two are already working on one murder case when Harry's childhood friend Harmony (Michele Monaghan) turns to him for help suspecting her sister's death wasn't suicide as reported. Their investigation takes Harry and Perry into LA's nefarious underworld, where things get more than a little precarious.

Buoyed along by Black's snappy dialogue and the bristling chemistry of its lead actors, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is an intoxicating new twist on a well worn formula. In the production notes Black states, "What I strived for was a movie that walks the line between something that takes itself seriously enough to be suspenseful but is playful enough to be entertaining and fresh." It's safe to say he succeeded.

Kevin Murphy