An uneasy marriage of hard-boiled noir and bombastic actioner, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is frustrating because it doesn’t live up to its potential. Robert Downey, Jr., and Val Kilmer are both terrific and most welcome to see back on the screen (though Downey looks much the worse for wear), and their buddy-movie rapport is entertaining. But the movie is a mishmash of clichés from several genres – pulp, cop movie, buddy movie, blow ‘em up – that lazily passes itself off as an homage.
Writer-director Shane Black’s idea of giving the genre(s) a twist is to make Kilmer’s character gay (and then oh-so-wittily name him “Gay Perry”), and it’s a tribute to Kilmer that he deftly evades the potential pitfalls and stereotypes such a character could create. No swishy moves or bumbling passes at straight guys – in fact, he’s about the only character in the movie who has his shit together and is utterly comfortable with who he is.
Kiss Kiss revels in graphic, loud violence as much as any mindless action film – many of which, incidentally, Black wrote – he wrote Lethal Weapon, but he’s also responsible for some of the dregs of the genre, like The Last Boy Scout and Last Action Hero. I guess he’s hoping most people watching Kiss Kiss didn’t see, say, The Long Kiss Goodnight, so he just reused the stunt of Geena Davis hanging by one hand and shooting with the other.
There are some clever lines (I’ve been
repeating the “Who taught you math?!” exchange for a
while), but mostly I spent the movie thinking how much better it could
have
been. It gets way too cutesily
self-referential,
with Downey narrating the movie with comments like, “So, this is the
scene
that’s in every movie, where this impossible coincidence happens, and
you know it
could never really happen, but it did here, I swear.”
At first it’s entertaining; after two hours,
it’s made the shift solidly to irritating. And he doesn't even
comment on one of the most unbelievable parts of the movie, when
Michelle Monaghan, as Downey's love interest, improbably deduces from a
few words on a phone call exactly what's going on on the other end of
the line.
It’s a shame that the movie doesn’t live up to Downey and Kilmer’s chemistry, but their rapport is probably worth your renting the movie.
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