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 Val Kilmer, left, and Robert Downey Jr. star in the uproariously entertaining Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It's available on DVD today. |
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang should be unwatchable -- a smug, self-congratulatory, smart-allecky, homophobic, misogynistic botch.
Turns out it's one of the most thrilling, stylish, inventive entertainments to arrive via the Hollywood pipeline in recent memory.
For that, credit first-time writer-director Shane Black. I say first-time, but Black is anything but a Hollywood neophyte, having made a mint -- and his mark -- writing Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Good Night, a towering trifecta of free-wheeling demolition that helped define the modern-day action movie machine.
With Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Black aims to have his pulp fiction and ridicule it too -- both satirizing and emboldening the genre that obviously inspired him. The guilty pleasures of his earlier thrillers are all evident -- Black stages dialogue and death with equally savage wit -- but Kiss Kiss is a more ambitious, accomplished enterprise. Those who call it a deconstruction imply it foresakes entertainment value for cool detachment (something another film Black penned, Last Action Hero, was rightly accused of).
But Kiss Kiss effortlessly works as both Hollywood self-parody and a delirious detective caper.
Robert Downey Jr., wily and winning, stars as Harry Lockhart, a thief-turned-actor-turned-private eye who becomes entangled in a noir plot thanks to a washed-up Hollywood starlet (Michelle Monaghan) he grew up in the same Indiana small town with (one of the many eye-rolling coincidences that would bother you if you weren't enjoying yourself so much).
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Trolling this Raymond Chandler-esque L.A., he's partnered with a gay sleuth nicknamed Gay Perry (Val Kilmer, never more droll or charismatic).
All three stars are in peak form -- as is Black, who, by reveling in the outlandishness of the genre, reminds us of the first time we fell in love with glorious, dimestore paperback trash.
EXTRAS: Commentary from Kilmer, Downey Jr. and Shane Black as well as a gag reel and theatrical trailer.
KISS KISS, BANG BANG
STARS: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan
DIRECTED BY: Shane Black
IN BRIEF: A petty thief comes to L.A. to be an actor in a Hollywood thriller and winds up entangled in a real-life murder mystery.
RATING: 4 out of 5