Remember how much fun it was when Steven Soderbergh retro-fitted Ocean’s Eleven, the Rat Pack’s signature heist picture, for a new generation of filmgoers? Well, imagine Soderbergh taking on a classic pulpy film noir, like Kiss Me Deadly or The Maltese Falcon (assuming you identify it as noir) and you just might have an idea of what Shane Black, best known as the writer of Lethal Weapon, has accomplished with his directorial debut. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a clever, post-modern noir, equal parts loving homage and biting parody that, despite its limitations, cleanly clears the bar of my expectations.
Robert Downey Jr., plays third rank petty thief Harry, a fast talking con artist who accidentally stumbles into an opportunity to make a screen-test. It’s great to see Downey has landed on his feet, and he is reliably wonderful herein, playing a man full of insecurities and unresolved issues who is thrown into situations way over his head. Val Kilmer, who plays Gay Perry, a gay private eye hired to teach Downey how to act like a P.I., steals most of his scenes. The pair makes a terrific sleuthing tandem, bouncing off each other wildly, in the manner of the best sort of character foils. In the process of being trained by Gay, Harry stumbles into a plot that involves incest, kidnapping, blackmail and murder most foul. Also tossed into the mix is the requisite femme fatale, Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan) a childhood obsession of Harry’s who was the one who got away, but not until after she bagged every guy in the graduating class except Harry.
Black clearly knows his way around this sort of pulpy tale, and he tells it with verve and panache. He appropriates the most obvious elements of the noir genre, such as the jaded voice-over narration, the bon mot-riddled and sexually-charged dialogue, the duplicitous behaviour of known and unknown associates and the palpable sense of dissolution and degeneracy that is key to the mood of such pieces, and manipulates them to create the sort of post-modern noir that will have film lovers laughing in recognition, though it may leave purists a little cold.
Admittedly, the film is at times just a tad too self-congratulatory with the kind of wink-wink nudge-nudge self-awareness you often find in such homages dressed up as parodies, and there are more than a couple of late-breaking plot developments that require the audience to not so much suspend disbelief as forget the word ever existed. Further, there are times when the film’s wincing violence is jarring, and threatens to kill the comic mood the rest of the tale is trying to establish. Still, the film is so playfully told, with some chillin’ chapter inter-titles, self-conscious narration and a deliciously self-denigrating narrative, that it’s easy to overlook these weaknesses and go with the flow.
Strangely, Roger Ebert has complained that the film’s dialogue fails because it doesn’t advance the plot. I say strangely because you would think a fellow as well-versed in such matters would know that there are many functions of dialogue, but that particularly in film noir, propelling the plot falls far back in the scheme of things compared to other concerns such as character development, sustaining (often sexual) tension between characters, and shading in the film’s mood. Just listen to the exchanges between Bogie and Bacall in To Have and to Have Not, or between Garfield and Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. While Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is flawed, its failure to use dialogue to move the plot along is not one of its weaknesses.
