Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

It's difficult to write about Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang for the benefit of those who have not seen the film. Really, the movie is about layered storytelling. What initially seems like it's going to be the story is really just a lead-in to the lead-in to the lead-in to the actual story. Writer/director Shane Black has piled so many levels of artifice into a single 100 minute film, the final effect is bewildering. You feel as if you've been told seven or eight engaging, funny and outrageous stories, and they all kind of link together in an odd way, but the experience taken as a whole it doesn't make any logical sense.

A simple summary might go as follows: "A thief posing as an actor and his childhood crush become involved in the complicated kidnapping case of a wealthy heiress." But the mystery itself is only background. This is a story about the fun and excitement of telling a story, and Shane Black's enthusiasm for this kind of punchy, strange, absurdist, darkly comic post-modern action-adventure is evident in every frame.



Dopey NYC transplant Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr. in maybe his most fall-down funny performance ever) narrates the entire film in a wry, self-aware manner. He's a movie narrator in the style of Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex or Ed Norton in Fight Club. It's a risky technique. Often, this sort of constant "commentary" on the action of the movie can grow tedious and annoying, particularly if it's clear that the narration exists only to tie together disparate plot threads or hold the audience's attention through a dull stretch of narrative.

But in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Harry's voice is essential. Not only because he's our guide to a considerably confusing and wholly original Los Angeles underworld, but also because his observations about the act of telling a story underline the entire point of the movie. Without Harry actually fretting about getting the details right, and nervously trying to contain his enthusiasm for the bits when the story gets really good, this could have been just another backstage Hollywood satire, albeit with more gunplay and gay jokes.

So what is the movie about? Harry, through a bizarre series of coincidences, finds himself giving up his criminal ways in New York and coming out to Los Angeles at the behest of a producer (Larry Miller). Soon enough, he finds himself at a party with a childhood friend, the stunningly beautiful Harmony (a wonderful performance from relative newcomer Michelle Monaghan), as well as the openly gay private investigator/movie consultant known to everyone as Gay Perry (a delightfully deadpan Val Kilmer).

Perry is working on a case for a young woman, tailing the scion of former actor and current wealthy socialite Harlan Dexter. Harry, on the other hand, is hired by Harmony to find out the truth behind her younger sister's recent suicide. (Harry has lied to Harmony and told her he is a private detective in order to get into her pants.)

Of course, the two cases turn out to be connected, and all three will spend the next several days pursuing men with guns, engaging in all manner of fight sequences, shootouts and car chases, and Harry will even be tortured with electrodes attached to his genitals. Though Black's witty, nimble dialogue garners a lot of laughs, it's really the outrageousness of his vision and the element of surprise that make Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang so ridiculously entertaining. Every time you think he has allowed the violence or the comedy to go as far as it can go, there's another scene with another shocking moment at the ready.

But, again, this is the point. It's a movie about what movies do, looking into how we can get swept up in an adventure that's constantly alerting us to its own improbability. Black gets us involved in a scenario before turning everything on its ear and uprooting the viewer again and again, but even better, he tells us beforehand that he's going to do it.

In a particularly clever device, Harmony initially came to Los Angeles because of an obsession with a series of pulp novels following a detective named Johnny Gossamer. Early on in the film, she and Harry reminisce about the books, noting that they always involve two mysteries that congeal into one, that they always include a gratuitous torture scene, random sex and a violent climax. One guess as to whether Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang will include all of these sequences (not to mention featuring a title that could suit any Gossamer book).

There are many many many more levels to the film I could discuss, but as I said, it will only really work as an immersive experience. Describing this kind of exuberant, over-the-top comedy doesn't do anyone any good.

What I can say is that the performances, particularly those of Kilmer, Downey Jr. and the beautiful Ms. Monaghan, are stellar. Kilmer plays a variation on several other characters, even his gruff, no-nonsense spook in David Mamet's somewhat disasterous Spartan, but with that real movie-star charisma he channels occasionally. I don't know what it is with this guy...When he's on, he's fucking dynamite - Jim Morrison, Doc Holliday. Iceman! But in so many other films, he slips into this tedious, bland, ponderous, nearly comatose state. Maybe he just needs to connect with the material. Gay Perry is one of the best characters I've seen in any movie this year.

And Downey Jr. also rises to the occasion. He's got more screen time than anyone else, and it's a role that requires a certain amount of manic energy. It would have been possible to go way too far and turn screechy rather than just neurotic, whiny and occasionally in pain. If this were Robin Williams and not Robert Downey Jr., the thing could have been an unmitigated disaster. But Rob's on top of his game, and manages to keep the whole convoluted thing together through sheer will.

And as I said before, Monaghan is incredibly beatiful and engaging and fun to watch (and willing to do one phenomenal scene topless!) She has that rare ability among attractive young actresses to seem entirely at home using salty language, cracking wise and cleaning up corpses. She's quite a find, and if only more people were going out to see this film, it could be a breakthrough performance.

And last but not least deserving of my unadulterated praise is writer Shane Black, famous since the 80's for penning the scripts to films like Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. (Yes, fine, okay, and Last Action Hero). I enjoy the first three of those movies, but to my mind, Black has never written a more delirious, chaotic and funny script. The fact that he makes his directorial debut with a movie this complex and layered is rather stunning. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is that rare movie with the ability to not only entertain but surprise, not just in how well in all comes together, but that something so unique, strange and disarming would be made at all.