Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

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You say you love detective movies? You love action? You love humor? You love twists? You love all that hip Tarantino stuff? And you love Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr., too? Then you might be happy to hear that 2005's "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" combines all of these elements in a highly entertaining, if offbeat, motion picture.

It's a good thing the film didn't cost a lot to make, though, because it didn't do too well at the box office. No doubt, much of the blame for this can be attributed to its title. What were audiences to do with something like "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"? It sounded like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." Nor did it help that there were two other films with exactly the same title released in 2000 and yet another in 1966 (unless it was one of the film's in-jokes to send up these other movies, too). What's more, the filmmakers couldn't even decide how to punctuate it. The movie's opening title uses no punctuation at all, but the movie's publicity campaign and the DVD's main menu put a comma in the middle. You'll remember I've said this before: If filmmakers can't make up their own minds about a simple thing like a title, how can they expect filmgoers to figure it out?

Anyway, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a first-time directorial effort by Shane Black, who is nevertheless no stranger to humorous action movies, having written "Lethal Weapon," "Last Action Hero," and "The Last Boy Scout." In "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," Black has taken in part a novel by Brett Halliday, "Bodies Are Where You Find Them," added his own satiric slant on the subject via classic mystery writer Raymond Chandler, and come up with an amusing concoction.

Downey stars as a petty thief named Harry Lockhart, who stumbles into a casting session one evening while running from the police. The casting agent is looking for somebody "real" to play the part of a detective in an upcoming movie, and Harry looks and acts the part perfectly. So they whisk Harry off to Hollywood, where we find him at a swank Hollywood party, telling his life story in a voice over. But as he also tells us, he's a terrible narrator, so he has to keep going back from time to time and rewinding the film to fill in the details he's forgotten to tell us about. That means that not only do we get a typical 1940s' style private-eye yarn told by the private eye (as in the Philip Marlowe flicks), we also get the disjointed narrative style of a "Pulp Fiction." Then, as an added touch of cinematic modernism, we get about 800 movie references throughout the film. As I say, very hip.

Now, here's the deal. Harry the crook is now Harry the would-be actor, and his agent assigns him his very own real-life private detective, a consultant to the studio, to teach him the ropes of the business. The real-life PI, played by Kilmer, is a seasoned, professional tough guy named Gay Perry ("Also," says Harry, "he's gay"). So we've got a seasoned, professional gay tough guy teaching a petty criminal how to be an actor pretending to be a private investigator.

You with me so far? Well, you can probably guess what happens. While Perry and Harry are out working a real-life stakeout (for the sake of Harry's getting the experience), the two fellows become involved in a real-life murder mystery. And not just a single murder mystery--a multiple murder mystery. What appear to be separate murders eventually all get intertwined into an intricate, convoluted plot reminiscent of most of the stuff produced by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, or Mickey Spillane years ago. Only this time it's done primarily for laughs.

To add spice to the story line, writer-director Black divides his tale into four days, labeling each of them with the title of a different Chandler story: "Trouble Is My Business," "The Lady in the Lake," "The Little Sister," and "The Simple Art of Murder." Moreover, you remember Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) getting his nose sliced in "Chinatown" and going through the rest of the picture with a bandage across it? With Harry it's a finger that's cut off, sewn back on, knocked off again, etc. The inside references never stop.

Downey and Kilmer make a good buddy team, although they are by no means buddies in the traditional sense. Perry sees Harry as a complete idiot, and he only helps him because the studio is paying him to do so. Harry, for his part, really is something of a klutz. Perry is the cool, calm, collected hero; Harry is the fumbling innocent, ironically a crook adrift in a sea of L.A. corruption. Kilmer is sort of the straight man to Downey's comedian, the Bud Abbott or Dean Martin to Downey's Lou Costello or Jerry Lewis. Only in this case, Kilmer is just as funny as Downey in his deadpan manner. Think of them more as Laurel and Hardy, with Laurel forever getting the exasperated Hardy into trouble. Even the grammar lessons are funny in this movie.

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