Unapologetic Action

KISS KISS BANG BANG

Directed by Shane Black

With Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shane Black finally gets around to directing a feature after about 20 years as a fabulously successful screenwriter-but he's been an auteur for much longer than that. For good or ill (if you're a critic, probably ill), Black's screenplays have more influence on American cinema than most directors' filmographies. He didn't invent the trashy, macho, buddy-driven Hollywood action film in the Joel Silver/Jerry Bruckheimer mode, but he perfected it by giving it a ritualized series of beats and a knowing, slightly prideful swagger.

Kiss Kiss continues that tradition. It's a virtual clearinghouse for everything Black learned while writing a particular, very lucrative if generally disrespected type of script. It's a jocular, brutal buddy flick about a badass gay private eye and a petty thief turned actor who team up to solve a real-life murder mystery. They crisscross LA in search of clues, attend amazing parties, flirt with smart-mouthed hotties and get beaten up and shot at by bad guys.

As in Black's scripts-Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Last Action Hero-the main characters' super-hard banter plays like a caricature of film-noir toughness, yet the action is Harold Lloyd/ Buster Keaton nutty, with people dangling from freeway overpasses while cars soar through the air. His scripts are hard-edged but essentially lightweight guy's-night-out stuff; they are also, to varying degrees, aware of themselves as movies, and sometimes seem dismissive of their own ludicrous movie-ness. In The Last Boy Scout, the chief henchman asks the hero, "Can we get a formal introduction?" and the hero replies, "Who gives a fuck? You're the bad guy, right?"

Black's rewrite of the box-office dud Last Action Hero, a vaguely meta action comedy about a gun-toting movie hero and a real boy jumping between fiction and reality, played like a Luigi Pirandello rewrite of Cobra. It carried Black's self-analytical tendency to what felt, at the time, like a new extreme. But Last Action Hero turns out to have been a mere warm-up for Kiss Kiss, a superficially arty but instinctively commercial thriller that's at once in love with action movie tropes and giddily contemptuous of them.

The film's obligatorily dense noir plot finds petty thief turned wannabe-actor Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.) hanging with super-cool private eye Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer) as research for a lead role in a private-eye movie. The assignment leads them into a couple of possibly intertwined mysteries: the death of a born again Christian actress and the mysterious suicide of another young actress whose sister, actress Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), grew up in the same small town as Harry and was also obsessed with hardboiled private eye fiction.

This is the kind of movie where people reveal multiple hidden motives and identities and turn up alive when you thought they were dead (and vice versa) while commenting on the unlikelihood of everything you just saw. Toward the end, I was reminded me of that famous anecdote about Howard Hawks directing a movie version of Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep. Hawkes wrote Chandler to ask who killed the chauffeur. Chandler confessed that he didn't know, either. I wish Black had taken Chandler's hint and either fudged the details of a plot he doesn't much care about anyway (the last act is a series of big, noisy set-pieces, even though what we really care about is the eccentric chemistry between the three leads) or contrived to present much less of it, because it's all just a pretext to riff on the subject that really does interest Black, namely the unspoken compact between trash-action movies and their audience.

What makes Black's work so saleable is that he understands that audiences aren't just willing to accept clichés; while watching movies like Kiss Kiss, they actually look forward to them (particularly Black's patented buddy-movie pairing of "ego" and "id" characters) in the way that children look forward to hearing the same bedtime stories read over and over, with the same tone and emphases.

Harry calls attention to the movie's transparent mechanisms (you better believe Kiss Kiss will be analyzed in commercial-scriptwriting courses) by narrating the entire movie in the klutzy but enthusiastic tones of a screenwriter at a pitch meeting, pausing to point out where he's foreshadowed important plot twists, set up recurring jokes and so forth. Serving as our surrogate and guide, Harry apologizes for a poorly-written expository scene, warns us to pay attention to stray moments that will turn out to be important later, and even freezes the movie to admit that he forgot to give us a crucial bit of information. After the guns-a-blazing climax, he reassures us that he's going to wrap things up so we can go home. "Don't worry," he says, "I saw Lord of the Rings. I'm not going to end this 17 times."

The fourth-wall-breaking riffs (brilliantly executed by Downey, who has perfected a modern version of Bob Hope's fast-talking coward/weasel character from the Road pictures) suggest that we're going to see a mildly subversive commercial thriller that combines escapism with self-critique. But Black can't or won't deliver on that implied promise because his commercial instincts are too strong. Except for an amazing and powerful scene where Harry has a tearful breakdown after his first kill, the filmmaker never lets his characters evolve beyond action-movie types, maybe because it would distract him from setting up the next whammy.

Perry's open homosexuality, for instance, seems a tacit admission that Black's heroes are all, in some sense, passing for straight, strutting through hyped-up cartoon fantasies of heterosexual machismo-agitating against tight-assed conformist bosses, conducting important business at strip clubs, needling and humiliating henchmen and informants, withstanding savage beatings and coming back for revenge. But the irony of an openly-gay badass giving a hapless straight guy a tutorial in macho tutorial isn't developed; Downey and Kilmer's lame banter about Perry's gayness is pitched at the level of a Kevin Smith movie, and we never get the sense that Perry has a public and a private demeanor, perhaps because if Black let us get a good look at the gay man behind the deadpan, straight-macho façade, Black's opening weekend fan base would rebel.

The result is an oddly underachieving movie. Black balances mayhem and silliness so expertly that he could have taken us much further from the beaten path if he'd wanted to. But it seems he didn't want to. Kiss Kiss is rudely amusing but never dangerous; it's as self-aware as Hollywood action movie screenplays can get without actually being smart. The title is misleading; while there's bang-bang galore, there's not much sex and even less sexual chemistry. The real excitement comes from the sight of Harry and Perry and Harmony busting each other's chops while Los Angeles explodes around them-the same source tapped by all of Black's scripts. It should have been called Quip Quip Bang Bang.