A number of years ago while flipping channels, I came across Shane Black’s directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang about halfway through on some cable channel, probably HBO. I had maybe heard of the movie, but it quickly grabbed my attention and held it until the end with an unpredictable plot and quirky sense of humor. However, I never quite got around to seeing the beginning.
Until now.
After a short scene showing a boy magician seeming to cut his female assistant in half with a chainsaw at a small town county fair (he doesn’t), we cut to the present as one Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is attending a Hollywood party. If you’re not quite sure how those two events connect, there’s a good reason for that: Harry is also the fourth-wall breaking narrator, and he’s a bit disorganized at best. Harry had been a smalltime thief in New York City when he’d been shot in the arm by a Good Samaritan and stumbled into an audition for a crime drama where his actual pain and anguish over what had just happened to him was mistaken for method acting.
Harry’s soon tailing “Gay” Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer), a private detective whose on a case with Harry as a tag along. That leads to a kidnapping, a woman’s body in the trunk of a car, and Harry’s general ineptness often making things worse even as he runs into his childhood crush Harmony Lane (Michelle Monaghan), an aspiring actress out who’s also looking for her long-missing sister. There’s intrigue involved, and while Perry is really good at what he does, Harmony and Harry’s best ideas come from the same source: they both loved the work of the same cheap paperback detective stories. Also, Harry may be bad at just about everything, even narrating his own story, but he does have very quick hands.
So, even knowing how the movie more or less ended, I did enjoy the hell out of this. Harry’s poor narration skills come up immediately as it takes him about twenty minutes to explain that he and Harmony were the two kids at the county fair, something he openly acknowledges as a mistake on his part. He screws up, often by doing things he saw on TV, and Perry is there to constantly tell him how wrong he is. Likewise, Harmony seems to be pretty on-the-ball compared to Harry, but there are a lot of plates being spun around as normal guy Harry has to deal with lifelong crushes, details that don’t quite add up, and corpses that pop up at the least convenient moments.
Besides, this is a Shane Black script, so you can be assured of a few guaranteed things. One is the movie is set around a holiday, most likely Christmas. Another is a plot that has a lot of twists, often the kind that subvert expectations like a shoot-out settled when a bystander pulls his own gun first. And finally, there will be a lot of clever dialogue, often with two men bonding over the course of the movie. Black makes a good slide into the director’s chair, and quite frankly, this might be the best movie he’s ever directed. Why did I wait so long to finish this? I don’t know, but I am glad I finally did.
Grade: A-
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