Entertaining detective spoof in the style of The Big Lebowski (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (DVD))

Member Name: Lichfield1979

Product:	Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (DVD)
Date:	04/08/08 (38 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Witty action comedy from the writer of Lethal Weapon

Disadvantages: Probably not one for young kids

The movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wears its love of hard boiled detective schlock on its sleeve, poking fun at the lumpen vernacular of the hack imitators of the genre's twin giant totems, Chandler and Hammett, and occupying the territory of neo-noir spoof instead of the more serious terrain of LA Confidential or Chinatown, keeping a violently comic dark edge but tracing its most recent lineage back through various enjoyable movies such as Get Shorty, Adaptation, The Big Lebowski, True Romance, The Long Goodbye, and Lethal Weapon.

The equally excellent Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer bumble their way through a foggy conspiracy of murder and mistaken identity in Hollywood, cracking wise and shooting their way out of the trouble that swirls around feisty femme fatale Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), like the ineptly gay and impotent versions of Riggs and Murtaugh, quarrelling over their bad choice of adverbs. Several of the characters share their love of the series of fictional gumshoe pulp adventures that knowingly informs the plot of the film. The narrator wryly observes "The guy writing the books died. Before he died, the guy who wrote the books said Johnny Gossamer was a joke. He wrote it for the money and it was all bull****. Harmony ignored this, she knew better, I mean who the hell was he, he was just the writer."

Writer/Director Shane Black's personal experience of having his own draft scripts shorn of their gleefully twisted bitter edge in favour of producing more standard action fare in the eighties and nineties sparkles through in the caustic delivery of Downey's many sardonic voiceovers as he wilfully tampers with the editing of this shaggy dog story comeback.

The film shares its title with a collection of essays in which the late critic Pauline Kael bemoaned Hollywood's frequent tendency to deliver nothing more than the most rudimentary schemes of entertainment that lacked the proper emotional punch. Kael had seen an Italian movie poster whose four-word tag translated literally as "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and she began to wonder whether this perfectly described all that the movie had to offer, further suspecting that the very devices which intrigued viewers sufficiently to be drawn to certain types of guilty pleasure were ultimately the same ploys responsible for leaving audiences feeling short changed.

But here Shane Black takes Jean-Luc Godard's old maxim that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun to exuberantly silly lengths and comes up with a triumph, inventively sending up his much loved targets (film noir, 1980's buddy movies) in much the same way that Brian DePalma finally realised the best way to successfully escape his faux-Hitchcock posturing was to inject the plot mechanics of 2002's inspirationally demented thriller, Femme Fatale, with absurd lashings of deadpan humour, and Wes Craven revitalised his career as a horror director with the now familiar post-modern trappings of Scream. The movie also shares a similar attitude and aesthetic with the standout episodes of another Joel Silver production, the sunshine-noir girl-detective television show, Veronica Mars, which has largely avoided world-weary clichés by making clever jokes and revelling in its pop culture heritage.

So it is that instead of earning a sobriquet like "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" as the uber-macho James Bond was once famously described, Perry Van Shrike, Val Kilmer's homosexual private detective, plies his trade under the moniker Gay Perry, like the world famous city of renowned romantic repute. Whilst the central character, failed magician, petty thief and erstwhile actor Harry Lockhart, has obvious antecedents like Chili Palmer, The Dude, and Charlie Kaufman, who have already subverted the more traditionally anticipated archetypes of Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, Robert Downey's considerable appeal, as he frivolously converses with the audience about his madcap adventures with trouble is my business scenarios involving little sisters and ladies in the lake and the simple art of murder, make him a welcome addition to the growing canon of practitioners of surrealist metaphysical mysteries from the pens of screenwriters like Kaufman and the Coens, and literary novelists like Paul Auster, with his New York Trilogy.

Writers such as Richard Price, Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos have sought to move the genre of crime fiction towards the realm of serious drama, even branching out into television scriptwriting themselves on David Simon and HBO's peerless The Wire, but even their more comic brethren Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen (and also now TV's Rob Thomas) have long shared their preference for eschewing conventional schemes of morality and narrative, redefining the landscape and often making anti-heroes of ambiguous lowlifes themselves, whilst James Ellroy has signally ploughed his own dark conspiratorial vision of America's sub-official history from his basement.

It is into these new traditions that the old fashioned detectives have returned, and for all the fine writing of Chandler and Hammett in the past, theirs is a much richer world for it, owing it's real roots to the much murkier moral compass of the writings of the great Jim Thompson in the fifties and sixties.

Summary: One of the best movies of it's type in recent years.