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KISS KISS BANG BANG
Film noir fans will be in heaven with an overly clever 2005 homage to the genre with the memorable title Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, that despite a convoluted and confusing storyline, is riveting and endlessly entertaining thanks to a trio of terrific performances in the starring roles.
This film introduces us to its star and narrator, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), a two bit thief who is mistaken for an actor auditioning for a movie who ends up in Hollywood at a party where he is reunited with a childhood sweetheart (Michelle Monoghan) and is taken under the wing of a gay private investigator (Val Kilmer) who get Harry involved in a murder mystery that defies description.
I love what director and co-screenwriter Shane Black's is trying to do here...he appears to be doing for the film noir genre what Wes Craven did for slasher movies with his Scream francise. Black is breaking all the rules here...he starts the film off with a noir-ish type narration, brilliantly performed by Downey Jr. that almost immediately breaks the 4th wall and makes no qualms about the fact that we're watching a movie, which I guess gives him the license to present a story that moves at such a lightening pace, contains so many red herrings, and makes so little sense that it is absolutely impossible to catch everything that is going on here...this was actually my third watch of this film and I'm still not convinced I caught everything, but I was so utterly entertained by the actors and the relationships they created onscreen I really didn't care and still don't.
It's the actors that give this film its enormous re-watch appeal, not the hard-to-take-it-all-in story...Robert Downey Jr., already a proven commodity where the ability to carry a film is concerned, does so again effortlessly here, with a grand assist from Val Kilmer, who seems to be having a ball putting his own spin on a gay movie character and Michelle Monoghan, conjuring up memories of Carole Lombard with her slick and sexy work here. If the screenplay weren't so overly complex and working so hard to be smarter than the actors, this movie could have been something really amazing, but, as it is, still worth watching...more than once.
Film noir fans will be in heaven with an overly clever 2005 homage to the genre with the memorable title Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, that despite a convoluted and confusing storyline, is riveting and endlessly entertaining thanks to a trio of terrific performances in the starring roles.
This film introduces us to its star and narrator, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), a two bit thief who is mistaken for an actor auditioning for a movie who ends up in Hollywood at a party where he is reunited with a childhood sweetheart (Michelle Monoghan) and is taken under the wing of a gay private investigator (Val Kilmer) who get Harry involved in a murder mystery that defies description.
I love what director and co-screenwriter Shane Black's is trying to do here...he appears to be doing for the film noir genre what Wes Craven did for slasher movies with his Scream francise. Black is breaking all the rules here...he starts the film off with a noir-ish type narration, brilliantly performed by Downey Jr. that almost immediately breaks the 4th wall and makes no qualms about the fact that we're watching a movie, which I guess gives him the license to present a story that moves at such a lightening pace, contains so many red herrings, and makes so little sense that it is absolutely impossible to catch everything that is going on here...this was actually my third watch of this film and I'm still not convinced I caught everything, but I was so utterly entertained by the actors and the relationships they created onscreen I really didn't care and still don't.
It's the actors that give this film its enormous re-watch appeal, not the hard-to-take-it-all-in story...Robert Downey Jr., already a proven commodity where the ability to carry a film is concerned, does so again effortlessly here, with a grand assist from Val Kilmer, who seems to be having a ball putting his own spin on a gay movie character and Michelle Monoghan, conjuring up memories of Carole Lombard with her slick and sexy work here. If the screenplay weren't so overly complex and working so hard to be smarter than the actors, this movie could have been something really amazing, but, as it is, still worth watching...more than once.