Arriving after he had disappeared from the scene for nearly a decade, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is pure, unfiltered Shane Black. It's his directorial debut, and it's a minor revelation. I use the word "minor" not to diminish his achievement, exactly, but to say that the film is basically a show-offy writer's exercise, a feature-length riff on hard-boiled crime fiction, formulaic buddy pictures, and the surreal vapidity of Hollywood. It's all throat-clearing and no opera, sputtering forward in fits and starts, winding through the most loveable shaggy-dog plot this side of The Big Lebowski. A cynic might call it Black's monument to his own cleverness; a fan like myself would call it the same thing, but with a sweeter inflection.
Heading a cast loaded with long-in-the-tooth stars from Black's heyday, Robert Downey Jr. makes an ideal conduit for the smug, hyperkinetic dialogue, which doesn't wait around after laugh lines for viewers to catch up. (Hence the film's high rewatch value, and its mushrooming cult status.) He plays the knockabout hero and voiceover narrator, Harry Lockhart, and when the storytelling gets a little bumpy, he breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the audience: "I don't see another narrator, so pipe down."
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Above all, the film is a celebration of language, often to the point where it indulges in hilariously wonky word-splicing, like when Harry and Perry have a fight about the proper use of an adverb. Fifty years ago, Black would have been right at home penning scripts for post-war noirs and gritty B-pictures, where stylized dialogue was more than just a means to connect one giant action setpiece to another. Until Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his words were effectively buried in the big-budget obscenities of the day; here, he finally got the chance to express himself fully, but Warner Brothers quietly shuffled the film into theaters as if it were an embarrassment. (This in spite of mostly very kind reviews.) There are enough memorable lines to stock the lion's share of blockbusters made during Black's self-imposed hiatus. A few favorites: "She's been fucked more times than she's had hot meals." "Go. Sleep badly. If you have any questions, hesitate to call." "I think you wouldn't know where to feed yourself if you didn't flap your mouth so much." "Did your dad love you?" "Well, he used to beat me in Morse code, so it's possible, but he never said the words." And so on. Watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang prompts wishes that Hollywood still had screenwriters talented enough to use explosion-filled trash as a means for personal expression. More improbably, it also prompts nostalgia for the glory days of the buddy comedy, which can really zing when the right actors bounce the right dialogue off each other. Not every project allows writers to examine the clichés they're generating—in that way and others, the film is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Black, and one he's earned—but we're now in an age where the cost of making movies is obscene, yet prominent, highly paid screenwriters with Black's abilities are nonexistent.
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