Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

The premise of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is so obvious that the film is at a disadvantage from the start. It is highly self-referential. In the opening scene the narrator, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), who is also one of the main characters, starts talking to us, the audience, about what is going to happen in the film. He pauses at several points in the film to do the same again. Towards the end, he discusses whether the film will have a happy ending and points out that the formula of many such films is to ensure a happy ending. He offers us two versions of the same scene. The film is much concerned with a mystery writer from the 1970s whose novels have been a source of fascination for one of the other main characters in the film, and for her father as well. These novels, or at least one of them in particular, prove to contain the plot or plots that the film itself is enacting.

This film is a kind of film noir and a kind of buddy film. One is especially reminded of the Lethal Weapon films, and not coincidentally the director/writer of this film--Shane Black--was also a screenwriter in all four of the Lethal films, so that there is another degree of self-reference here (a film colleague pointed this out to me), although there is no real parallel between the buddy characters in this film and the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover characters.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is as full of strange twists and turns as LA Confidential or The Maltese Falcon. When Lockhart, who robs toy stores, is confused with an actor who is auditioning for a part in a detective film, he gets the role of a detective. At his director's party he meets a gay detective, Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), who offers to train him for the part by enlisting him in his investigation of a man he has been hired to survey. Murders ensue, and for at least one of them Lockhart appears to have been framed. A beautiful aspiring actress whom Lockhart meets at a party turns out to be a girl on whom he had a high school crush years before.

The film is certainly entertaining, but the whacky and spontaneous atmosphere it cultivates, where anything can and will happen, is forced and predictable and stale. Val Kilmer is fine in his role, as is Downey.