Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Tags: comedy, dark, neo noir, murder, boring, mystery, bleak, cult, violence, flashback, clever, humor, satire, plot twist, entertaining

Plot synopsis:
The movie opens in flashback to about 1980 at a fair in Indiana of some sort with pie eating contests, etc. The camera settles on a boy magician named "Harry the Great", who is about to perform a trick where he saws a girl in a box in half with a chainsaw. Midway, the girl lets loose with a series of piercing screams, panicking the audience and some nearby adults who rush up and open the box. The girl is just pretending to be hurt and smiles up at the adult man professing "I'm going to be an actress" before he slaps her.The movie cuts to a generic Hollywood beautiful person party where we see Harry (Robert Downey Jr.), fully but shabbily clothed, intentionally teetering at the edge of a pool full of bikini clad women. At this point the narrator (Harry) introduces himself and apologizes, somewhat defensively, for not being very good. "Do you see any other narrators?" he asks. (The movie repeatedly revisits the idea that the narrator isn't a trustworthy source. The symbolism is that the pool represents the Hollywood lifestyle and he's trying to decide whether to jump in or not). He (as the narrator) asks us if we want to know how he got here.We now cut to a small toy store late at night. Two thieves are rummaging around. One of them, Harry, is on the phone with his niece as she describes the action figure ("CyberCop") she wants for Christmas. Harry pretends that the store is open and he's on a regular shopping expedition, but his niece isn't buying it (it's too late at night). A large UPS truck drives by, jostling the wiring on the jury rigged alarm and setting it off. The two run out the back door and into an alley, where they are fired upon by a woman on a fire escape. Harry's partner is hit, but Harry escapes on foot as the police approach. He runs from alley to alley until he encounters a milling group of men who are all dressed in dark thiefish clothing like himself. He runs up a stairway and crashes into a room with 3 or 4 people sitting around a desk. A woman tells him they're not ready for him yet, but another man, a Larry Miller-ish casting agent (played by - who else - Larry Miller), tells him to go ahead and hands him a script. It's from some sort of hard boiled crime thriller in which the main character is being berated for allowing his partner to be killed. Harry stumbles through it for a couple of lines before the similarity to his current situation gets to be too much and he loses it, throwing a chair and putting his head on the lap of one of the casting agents and begging forgiveness. At this moment a cop bursts through the door, before apologising for interrupting and ducking back out. Larry Miller says he's found what he's looking for and hires Harry for the part suspiciously quickly - his motives become clear much later...Meanwhile, back at the party, a woman (Michelle Monaghan) named Harmony is introduced by the narrator, who dips a little into her back story through a few brief flashbacks - noting that she is from a small town, likes reading a crime series about a detective called "Johnny Gossamer", and alluding to the fact that their father may have sexually abused her sister Jenna. The narrator then realizes that he isn't explaining how she got to the party, which he then goes into, the reason involving an actor from a cancelled TV show about a robot who drunkenly broke into her house in his costume. Long story short, she gets invited to the party, where she is seen going over the bookshelves in the house until she finds some copies of the same old paperback detective series - "Johnny Gossamer". She hugs them tenderly, reads from them for a bit and then passes out on a table. A sleazy man enters and, seeing her unconscious - starts to poke around in her underthings before Harry walks in. Harry tries to intervene but ends up being beaten to a pulp - reflecting he never was very good at fighting. After the man walks away, Gay Perry (Val Kilmer) helps Harry up. He tells Harry he's a high end private detective who's been hired by the films producers to train Harry in the ways of private detecting. He takes him into the bathroom and helps him clean up. Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen) pokes his head in and introduces his daughter, who is getting ready to cut her birthday cake. She has apparently been in Europe for many years and threatening to sue her father over her deceased mother's money, but they've patched things up and are all nicey-nicey.Gay Perry is getting ready to leave the party when Harry asks him about the woman. Perry recognises her and recommends Harry go to the Domino bar, which he does.Harry shows up at the club and walks past the doorman without being hassled. He encounters a woman named Flicka (Angela Lindvall) has a brief conversation (she tells him she's a stewardess, he lies and tells her he's a PI (important later). It takes about an hour. The woman from the party is sitting at the bar. Harry sits next to her and launches into conversation. They flirt a little bit with her suggesting Harry take up with the woman across the bar who's 35 and still attempting to act. Harry asks her how old she is and she says she's 34. Harry starts to walk away after a little banter, but she calls him back. She can't believe he doesn't recognize her. She's his childhood friend Harmony (the girl being sawn in half at the beginning of the movie by young magician Harry). Harmony's friend shows up and becomes very hostile - trying to drive Harry off. Harmony calms her down and Harmony and Harry head to a table.Harmony describes growing up in Indiana parallel to Harry. She was turned onto the Johnny Gossamer books by reading them to her invalid mother. Her father was a child molester who abused her younger sister while she stood helplessly by. She compensated by sleeping with everybody in high school except Harry, who was her best friend and Harry's best friend because he asked he not to. As soon as she could, she escaped to Hollywood to be a star, but the only work she's gotten is as a European milkmaid in a cheesy beer commercial with a CGI bear. Harry asks if she wants to come back to his place and, to show he has good intentions, suggests she bring her hostile friend with her.Harry wakes up the next morning with a girl in his bed. He thinks it's Harmony, but is shocked to find out it's her hostile friend instead. He runs to Harmony's place and apologizes profusely at her door. She's initially pissed, but somewhat mollified as he goes.Perry and Harry are heading out to a stake out. Gay Perry says that he's got a commission from a woman named Allison Ames whom he has only spoken to over the phone - to stake a place out and record anything that happens. Harry and Perry drive down a windey dirt road to a woodsy house and hide behind a woodpile with a video camera . Someone comes out of the house in a ski mask, gets in an old beater car and drives off. Harry and Perry follow them by car. They seem to lose him and stop by a pond next to a low ridge to get their bearings. As they look around, the beater car comes shooting airborne over the ridge and lands in the pond. Harry jumps into the water to save the driver as Perry says no one was in the car. Harry persists, and finally Perry dives into the water emerging holding a body. It's a woman in a sundress - she's dead with a broken neck. They drop her on the sand. Harry notices she has no underwear (plot point). Perry says they need to cover this up like they were never there. Harry "helpfully" throws Perry's gun into the water. Perry points out that that was a custom ceramic gun given to him by his mother and it's very traceable. He then smacks Harry in the nose with a briefcase. Two figures in ski masks appear on top of the ridge and shout at them before taking off.Perry drives Harry back to Harry's hotel. As he drops him off and Harry is walking away, Perry returns with Harry's ringing cell phone that was left in the car. Giving it to him and they both listen as Harry answers. It's the police asking him if he knew of Harmony because her body needs to be identified before being ruled as suicide. Harry is left heartbroken and goes back to his hotel room to drown his sorrows when there's a knock at the door. It's Harmony, somehow alive. Turns out her younger sister has come to town, stolen her credit cards, maxed them out ($2000 to an unspecified party) and then committed suicide; which explains the mistaken call; as the police initially identified the sister as Harmony herself. She's distraught and wants to talk to Harry since she thinks he's a private detective (Flicka told her). She eventually badgers Harry into investigating her sister's murder (she doesn't believe it was suicide) and then faints - it seems Harry agrees so he can spend more time with Harmony in much the way he would get a kick out of her crying on his shoulder when she was upset as a teenager.She eventually wakes up again and leaves as Harry heads to the loo. The bathroom is long and deep with the toilet on the far end, a bathtub to the left of the toilet and a towel closet to the right of the toilet. Harry is relieving himself standing up when something on the left catches his eye. He turns to look without interrupting the stream and winds up covering the corpse from the car trunk with pee. Someone's stashed it in his bathroom. He crawls into the towel closet and calls Perry. Perry says that it's a setup and somewhere in the room they must have also hidden a gun. Harry quickly finds it under the bed. Down in the hotel lobby Harmony is just leaving as the cops arrive. She overhears that they're headed to Harry's room and makes a quick judgement to misdirect them to a different room. Perry shows up and they bundle up the corpse again. They can't figure out how to get it out of the hotel, so they decide to take it up to the roof and toss it into a dumpster in an alley. They miss and the body bounces off the edge of the dumpster. Harry and Perry rush down to the alley and shove the body into the trunk of the car. Just at that moment the police drive by. Perry grabs Harry and kisses him to make it seem like they're having a liaison. The police crack some jokes and drive off. Harmony shows up just in time to see the kiss. Harry and Perry ditch the body at a random street side location.The next day Harry and Perry meet and Perry gives Harry two pieces of bad news: 1) He isn't really up for a role in the film. He's being used to demonstrate the producer's seriousness about recasting the role so that Colin Farell will accept less money. 2) He told Harmony that he isn't a PI and she's pissed. Also, it turns out the body in the car was Dexter's daughter (The one who was trying to sue Dexter for the mother's inheritance). Harry heads to the airport to fly home.While he's waiting for his flight he sees Flicka and tries to chat her up, but she's not very interested. Somehow it comes up that Harmony's stage name is Allison Ames (the name of the woman that hired Perry) and he rushes back to Harmony's place realising the $2000 Harmony's sister spent was to hire Perry to investigate the case he and Harry were on when the car drove into the lake. She doesn't want to hear it and slams the door on him, severing a joint and a half of his left ring finger. She rushes him to the hospital where it's precariously sewn back on and lightly bandaged up. They also drug Harry up really good on pain killers, so he's pretty stoned. In a phone call with Harmony he explains the link between the two cases and leaves a message for Perry who will be at a party Harmony is working that evening. Harry heads over (High as a kite) and they find Perry - who seems disinterested and heads off to an unrelated stakeout of some girl, telling the two to behave until he returns. Harry wanders off to look at a dancer dressed like a deer, but is jumped by two thugs (A white guy, and a black one who calls himself "Mustard" - the same thugs in ski masks who appeared on the ridge after the lake crash) who beat him up and almost pull his finger off again before telling him to get out of town. Harmony and Harry rush off to the hospital to get his finger fixed again when Harmony notices that the two black and white thugs are headed towards Perry's stakeout and insists on going to warn Perry before getting Harry's finger fixed. Harry passes out in the back seat as Harmony parks the car and jumps out to find Perry. She's jumped by one of the thugs, but manages to get the better of him and knock him out - unable to kill "Mustard" the thug but taking his gun.A girl with purple hair shows up and Perry starts following her. She purposefully leads him under a bridge, the white thug driving up behind him - starting to line up in order to run Perry over. Harmony rushes to save him, dropping her gun and accidentally catching Perry's attention - he spots the approaching car and leaps out of the way. The driver careers toward a hot dog stand destroying tables - just as Gay Perry prepares to kill the white thug as he exits the vehicle, the hot dog vendor shoots the thug down. In the chaos, the girl with purple hair runs around looking for an escape. She finds a car with the door open and the keys still in it. Of course, it's Harmony's car with Harry passed out in the back seat. Harmony returns to where she left the first thug, but he's gone.Harry wakes up the next day in the back seat of the car in a strange garage in a strange house totally confused (which must mean he got there the entire way without the purple-haired girl seeing him lying asleep in the backseat...) He walks around inside calling out but no one responds. The surviving thug shows up with the girl with purple hair, so Harry hides under a bed. He hears them talking. She's apologizing for the foul up, but says it isn't her fault. The thug agrees and says a number of ominous things about how he's going to set things up so it's never her fault again, and then shoots her dead. Harry holds his fingers to her lips as she mutters before dying. The thug runs off to get something to wrap the body with. So Harry, in a daze, gets out from under the bed. The thug comes back and sees him. The thug starts taunting him until he realizes he's left the gun on the bed. Harry shoots him. Harry's finger has come off, so he puts it in a bowl with ice and calls Perry. While he's talking to him, a dog comes up and grabs the finger. Harry tries to get it back, but the dog swallows it. Harry seems resigned to its loss. He then cleans off the gun, puts the girl's fingerprints on it so the police will think she and the thug killed each other and leaves.Harmony, Perry and Harry get together to wrap things up, secure in the knowledge that the whole thing was a kidnapping plot gone wrong. Perry jokes that it seems anti-climactic: No one's been tortured yet (foreshadowing). Harry and Harmony head up to Harry's room. Harmony mentions that in an attempt to save her sister's sanity, she told her that their father wasn't really their father. She lied that he was a famous Hollywood film star that had visited town on a "Johnny Gossamer" film shoot. They get wasted at the hotel bar. As Harmony strips in the bedroom to go to sleep, Harry is reminded how the body from the lake wasn't wearing underwear. He offers to sleep on the couch, but they both wind up in the bed about to sleep together when Harmony says she has to admit something. The next shot is Harry throwing her out because she confessed to sleeping with his best friend in high school, the one guy he asked her not to. Harry makes sure her fingers are clear before slamming the door.Harmony wanders off when something occurs to her. She calls Harry up and asks if the body in the trunk was raped. He replies that it wasn't, the report came back negative. He hangs up. A little later, Perry calls Harry up and says Harmony left a message saying she had it all figured out. Perry wants to know what Harry told her. Harry racks his brain and then mentions the underwear thing. Perry seems to all of a sudden magically figure out what's going on. Perry and Harry go to the local insane asylum, where they meet a large woman patient. They ask her to lift her robe. She does. No underwear. Perry puts it together: Dexter had hidden her daughter away in the looney bin and replaced her with a lookalike so that he could use her to request that the lawsuit dropped. But the daughter's European boyfriend was coming to visit, so he had to kill her to bring the ruse to a close (the boyfriend would see through the double). Harmony's sister must have been the double, which is why they murdered her and made it look like a suicide. Perry and Harry assume that Harmony also went to the asylum and was grabbed, so now they have to find her.Harry and Perry head out from the asylum where they meet an orderly who holds them at gunpoint and starts marching them back. Perry gets the gun from him and they start trying to interrogate him. Harry, fantastic magician that he is, decides to take the orderly's revolver and pretend to play russian roulette with him to add force to the interrogation. He thinks there's an 8% chance of the one bullet he left in the gun going off. And of course it does. Scratch one orderly. As Perry and Harry hide the body, they're surprised by Dexter and another thug. While they're getting frisked, Perry's phone rings. The thug takes the phone and throws it over to Dexter, but Harry catches it and shuts into the phone that they've been caught by Dexter. The thug retrieves the phone from Harry, listens and tells Dexter that it was just a carpet cleaning service. But it was actually Harmony who managed to pretend to be someone else.They're taken to a hospital to be tortured. We learn the thugs are heading to cremate Dexter's daughter ASAP to remove evidence of gunshot wounds. Thug #3 hooks up electrodes to Harry's balls and proceeds to start the torture. Perry starts taunting him with homophobic slurs. The thug gets angry and starts yelling at Perry, pounding on the electrode button to emphasize his point. Harry's not having a good time. Finally, Perry mimes grabbing at his balls, but it turns out he has a gun hidden there. The thug is killed by bullets flying out of Perry's crotch - he explains homophobes never check the pelvic region.Harmony calls Perry - she's been at home the whole time. She rushes to the hospital. Dexter and company have loaded the body into a van and are about to leave. Harmony grabs the van and drives off. Three thugs who waited at the van grab a car and chase the van. The back doors of the van are open, so the coffin is in danger of flying out at any time. Harmony crashes the van on an overpass, sending the coffin over the edge. It lands on a sign above the underpass. An arm pops out. Harmony's OK, though. Harry and Perry keep running up and get into a gunfight with one of the thugs. The thug is shot, but not before shooting a bullet through Perry's chest and into Harry. Harry tries to give Perry mouth to mouth, but Perry starts coughing up blood. Meanwhile, Harmony has jumped off the road and into a median, slamming her forehead on the grass and drawing blood. The resulting concussion leaves her pretty dazed, but she manages to call Harry on Perry's cell phone and requests a rescue, then passes out. Harry gets up, taking Perry's gun.In the process of attempting this rescue, Dexter shows up and tries to run Harry down. He jumps off the overpass and lands on the coffin perched on the freeway sign. He accidentally drops the gun onto the casket and slides off, hanging onto the arm and dangling above the speeding traffic. Dexter rushes to the edge of the bridge to shoot him, Harry jogging the coffin and knocking the gun down - catching it in the nick of time and shooting Dexter. Dexter remarks on what a good shot it is before dying ("Captain fuckin magic"). Some thugs are speeding towards unconscious Harmony to finish her off, but Harry manages to shoot the driver while dangling from the coffin, dropping onto the roof of the car as it passes under. Managing to kill the last two thugs with some showy moves, Harry staggers over to Harmony, and pulls out a Jonny Gossamer book from his breast pocket - complimenting it on stopping the bullet. Harmony points out that it didn't. The hole goes all the way through - thus Harry passes out.Harry wakes up at the hospital. Harmony is in the room with him. Perry rolls in on a wheelchair. The narrator comments about how much he hates studio enforced happy endings. To slam the point home, everybody who died in the movie walks in (purple-haired girl and thugs included), smiling and waving..... followed by Elvis and Abraham Lincoln. They all disappear, though (except Perry, Harry and Harmony). Perry explains that through his police contacts, he has found that Harmony's sister came to town to find her father, whom she thought was Dexter. She started following him around and what she found eventually saw was Dexter having sex with his "daughter" (which was actually the double and also the one wearing the pink wig). Thinking it was incest, she hired Perry to film it (using Harmony's credit cards) and then killed herself since to her both her real father and pretend father were abusive.Harmony, Harry and Perry head back to Indiana for Harmony's sister's funeral. Perry confronts Harmony's father, who's on oxygen and bedridden and slaps him repeatedly. Her father taunts Perry for taking advantage of someone who's defenseless and Perry smiles. He's made his point.The last shot is a year later. Harry, much better dressed, is making a video recording of himself telling the whole story. Perry, who employs him now, walks up, encourages the audience to stay through the credits, rips on the key grip a little and shuts the camera off.Credits roll.

Review: Directed and co-written by Shane Black; based on a novel, "Bodies Are Where You Find Them" written by Brett Halliday; and starring Robert Downey Jnr, Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan.A terrific opening credit sequence easily sets up the audacity and chagrin of the film for an appreciative audience.
Even the clichés are clever e.g. a tough guy predictably crashes through a glass table, or body after body turns up, to haunt the characters.I strongly recommend the movie, given the talent of Downey and Kilmer.
Breaking down with tears in the office, he accidentally gets the acting job and whisked off to Hollywood with hopes of playing a detective in an upcoming film.Cue Gay Perry a.k.a Val Kilmer who is fantastic in this film with his dry wit and humour adding some hilarious scenes to this film.
He plays a gay detective assigned to help train up Robert Downey Jr. The pair of them get sucked into a story starting with discovery of a corpse and building into deeper plot involving kidnapping and murder.
Shane Black directs this film superbly, keeping it alive with sharp wit.The whole cast clicks together perfectly with Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer shining with good support coming from Michelle Monaghan.
The film is accompanied by a very light hearted narration from Robert Downey Jr. which makes the film that even bit more engaging.Overall, a quirky, very amusing film, with a superb cast, and with a run time of 99 minutes, you simply can't afford to miss it.Kiss Kiss Bang Bang...
The language gets pretty rough, there is strong sexual content, Val Kilmer is a detective who just happens to be gay and jokes are made at his expense, there's a decent amount of gunplay, and some people just might not appreciate the unconventionality on display.But I loved the fact that this wasn't formulaic and that the look and style was different than the norm.
Perhaps some might like their movies a little more bright, but I thought it was quite effective at giving the film the pulp detective story vibe that Black was going for.I wouldn't recommend this to my mother, so I won't pretend to know whether this fits *your* taste either.
Yes, a buddy-movie, film-noir, murder mystery, crime-thriller, all rolled into one hip modern self-referential update, packed with amusing references to all the clichés of the genres depicted.
Val Kilmer plays the real private eye, Perry Shrike (half the fun is picking the right name!) who has to learn him the trades of the business, but soon they both wind up in a murder mystery with so many twists and turns (and bodies), it'll make your head spin.
Another mistake then shifts him from actor to private detective, and this is where Val Kilmer comes in and things start to go wrong, more wrong and unbelievably wrong until they've snowballed into an enjoyable detective mess -- all to impress failed actress Harmony (Next big thing: Michelle Monaghan).Shane Black's directorial debut 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' is a comic film noir.
What makes it so special is that it mixes equal doses of humour and crime like a $15,000,000 blender, pouring out a balanced end product and glazing it with a clever narrative coating by Robert Downey Jr. Black also sprinkles some rapid-fire dialogue onto his product, which is facilitated by the comedic chemistry between Downey and Kilmer.
Robert Downey Jr., one of the best film actors, is paired in this movie with Val Kilmer, who tends to play heavy roles, but has never been seen as he is shown in the movie.
The chemistry between them seems to indicate these two actors had a lot of fun while making the film, as it shows in the way they play against one another.Lovely Michelle Monaghan is seen as Harmony, a beautiful young hopeful working her way up in Hollywood.
I was lucky enough to see a preview of Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang at a 'mystery' film showing at the Rivoli Cinemas in Melbourne recently.I really don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy the film as throughly as I did.The film centers around Harry (Robert Downey Jnr) a petty thief who while escapes into an audition for a new detective movie.
But with so many bodies all at once, are the cases as separate as they first appear?Having spent a bit of time in the wilderness since his glory days, Shane Black returned to the screens properly as writer and director with an effective film that works surprisingly well in the genre he dominates while also poking fun at it.
Monaghan is sexy but has to carry a lot of the narrative; Bernsen is merely a face; Miller has a small turn but generally everyone is in the shadown of Kilmer, Downey and Black.Overall this is not a perfect film and those that don't like Black or the genre will probably not get it but it is still a lot of fun.
As its title suggests, ""Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a film noir spoof whose energy and style compensate for its overall dearth of laughs.The highly complicated plot begins when Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), a petty thief living in Manhattan, literally stumbles into a movie acting career while fleeing the police on a heist gone wrong.
Before he knows what's happened, he's standing by a pool in Hollywood surrounded by a slew of movie-making hotshots and wannabe starlets including Val Kilmer as a gay private eye and Michelle Monaghan an aspiring actress who also happens to be a childhood chum from Harry's days growing up in Indiana.
Then, as if he had suddenly fallen into one of those dime store crime novels, Harry finds himself plunged into a dark mystery involving not one but two unexplained murders.Writer/director Shane Blake has a great time lampooning not merely the conventions of film noir and Chandler-esquire pulp fiction - the convoluted plotting, the self-conscious dialogue, the smart-alecky narration and the casual popgun violence - but Tinsel Town phoniness as well.
In both storyline and style, the film often blurs the fine line separating mundane "reality" from the contrivances and absurdities of movie fiction, most notably by having Harry frequently address the audience directly in his narration.There's no denying that "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a high energy lark, filled with creativity and imagination and featuring sharp performances from Downey Jr., Kilmer, Monaghan and a whole host of excellent supporting players.
In LA, while escaping from the police after an unsuccessful robbery, the small time thief Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is accidentally submitted to an audition for a role of detective in a movie, and invited to a party.
With the support of Harmony, they find the sordid truth of the case."Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a funny, but also violent, action movie with an original screenplay, where the lead character is actually the narrator of the events.
Robert Downey Jr. is excellent in the role of the loser Harry Lockhart and shows a great chemistry with the delicious Michelle Monaghan, and also with his gay partner Val Kilmer.
If you want to see a good self-referential film about bad movies, try "Adaptation." You will miss nothing if you skip "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.".
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is definitely that, and it does a generally good job of working in both universes, although it is certainly a more effective comedy than a noir, but it gives the latter a good shot.Harry (Robert Downey, Jr.) is a crook ripping off a department store in New York City (trying to steal a present for his daughter, no less) when a twist of fate causes the alarm to sound and Harry runs for it, happening upon an audition for a film featuring a police detective.
What appeared to be just a routine job becomes a complicated web of lies, deceit and bodies.Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was written and directed by Shane Black, the writer of the original Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight, and anyone familiar with his work from those films will instantly recognize his style here.
Kiss kiss, bang bang.Robert Downey, Jr. plays Harry Lockhart, a small-time crook from the east coast who gets his partner killed in a toy store robbery and, on the run from cops, stumbles into an open casting audition.
Go and see it anyway, just for the scenes between Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer, Shane Black has written the best material for their characters, I can't find fault in it.
I almost feel like I need to watch it again to fill in the holes.There were jokes throughout, but I felt the direction was poor because the dialogue was so fast that by the time you got to laugh and the audience laughter died down you missed stuff.I loved the Hollywood/NY comparisons.
Shane black writes and directs this hilarious crime comedy caper starring Robert Downey jr, Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his directorial debut, also shares these attributes, but suffers from a convoluted plot and a script so overloaded with witticisms and clever asides that the viewer soon feels overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of the experience.Robert Downey Jr. plays a low-life criminal who inadvertently becomes a potential movie star whilst escaping from a heist gone wrong (on the run, he stumbles into an audition and gets the part).
However, things take a turn for the worse when he goes undercover as a private-eye (in order to gain first hand experience necessary for the role) and witnesses a murder...Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an ambitious debut  several complex plot threads intertwine and an ingenious narrative links scenes - but despite his best efforts, Black loses control of affairs and the film spirals out of control.
Upon arriving he meets his tutor, a real private-eye named "Gay Perry." (Val Kilmer) And as he says, he's not gay "Oh no I'm knee deep in p***y; I just liked the name so much though I'd keep it." Before Harry can say the title of the movie he's starring Harry is thrown into a real murder mystery, involving the sister of his high school sweetheart Harmony played by Michelle Monaghan.
STAR RATING: ***** The Works **** Just Misses the Mark *** That Little Bit In Between ** Lagging Behind * The Pits A career thief (Robert Downey Jr.) and a gay detective (Val Kilmer) both happen to be in Hollywood at the same time to audition for the same role.
It frantically tries to be a non-stop ride of clever in-jokes and wittiness, sometimes it pulls it off (a scene where Downey Jr. and the leading female character sit in a bar and poke fun at celebrity 'lookalikes' is one example) but at other times the film can get a little too smart for it's own good and can grate on the nerves.In the leading roles, Kilmer gives a better performance than usual but Downey Jr. shows a bit of Nicolas Cage syndrome and has no doubt thrown a lot of his own real life crazy personality into this role.
A well adapted Brett Halliday novel done by director Black most of the dialogue is not serious but that is good because in this line of material you want to hear something funny Petty crook Harry Lockhart (Downey Jr.) is mistaken for an actor and sent to L.A where he meets up with his dream girl sweet heart (Monaghan).
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was one of the best films I've seen in a long timeit was entertaining, smart, and funny and it also had great style.
He runs into the extremely enticing aspiring actress Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), whom he manages to convince that he is an actual detective, and gets mixed up in a case Perry is working involving Harmony's kid sister and Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen), a former actor turned entrepreneur.Taking his inspiration from a novel by Brett Halliday, writer & debuting director Shane Black of "Lethal Weapon" fame basically sends up pulp detective fiction and the ever-popular "buddy- cop" genre.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang sees a type of film-noir parody that has Robert Downey Jr's Harry Lockhart, an aspiring actor, entangled in an impenetrable storyline that revolves around an assortment of rich movie people with bad intentions and Byzantine methods of realizing them.
He is very underdeveloped and that's the only thing disappointing because most of Black's villain are at least developed or have a personality which this villain lacked because of the limited screen time that he got.Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a perfect example of how to be clever with its story whether it's a buddy film, a black comedy, or a thriller.
With his directorial debut, Shane Black presents a style full of self-awareness, subverting some clichés of the noir genre while playing others straight, all of this carried by a fantastic performance by Robert Downey Jr as main character Harry Lockhart.It's hard to label Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a buddy cop movie, not with so much more focus on one perceived "buddy" over the other, and neither of them are cops either.
Val Kilmer as Perry and Michelle Monoghan as Harmony also give good performances, but the range Downey gives from smarmy and casual to emotional and serious is stunning, one of the best parts of the movie.However, that particular range can be said for the movie as a whole; it always feels like these are actual people talking and interacting with one another, not people on a screen.
Divided into chapters titled after Raymond Chandler novels, the film follows petty criminal turned aspiring actor Downey as he gets involved with a witty detective (excellently played by Kilmer) and a sexy actress (Monaghan).Downey is a bit of a sad sack into the movie, clueless and rash, and while his performance is quite different, it reminded me a bit of Bob Hope film noir take-offs.
Here's a sophisticated little postmodern film romp, an L.A.-based murder mystery adapted from pulp writer Davis Dresser's (a.k.a. Brett Halliday) 1941 novel, "Bodies Are Where You Find Them." Shane Black (who wrote the screenplays for "Last Action Hero" and the "Lethal Weapons" series) has written - and made his debut directing - a slick movie full of hip, facile dialogue that is self-referential to the max.The mystery story itself and other subplots are adroitly interwoven.
Besides couple of scenes that are written properly and two fantastic actors - Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. that they did their best, this movie is good for direct to video thing.
His trademark snappy dialog is better than ever and there are plenty of "cool or stylish" moments and a wonderful little murder mystery wrapped around a sorta-love story.Casting of Val Kilmer initially seemed like a bad call, but the talented bad boy shines as an openly gay private detective who is hired to teach an actor how to be a PI.
The references to other movies come fast and furious throughout, from "Chinatown" to "Reservoir Dogs," as well as the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and their countless film adaptations, though the digs at Hollywood aren't quite as scabrous as "L.A. Confidential." Including scenes from a younger Corbin Bernsen crime movie is used here illustratively to the plot almost as integrally as the old Terence Stamp film in "The Limey." He certainly does look like a matinée idol gone to see, but then so does Val Kilmer.A key to making this all original is Robert Downey Jr.'s marvelous comic and earnest turn as a fish out of water as a crook imitating an actor imitating a private investigator, which even recalls what tends to happen to Bob Hope in the "On The Road" movies.
KISS KISS, BANG BANG (2005) ***1/2 Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bernsen, Dash Mihok, Larry Miller, Rockmond Dunbar, Shannyn Sossamon, Angela Lindvall.Back in Black!Shane Black is back in a big way.
This sure as hell ain't.Based loosely on a novel by Brett Halliday, "Bodies Are Where You Find Them", the story focuses on small-time petty New York City criminal Harold "Harry" Lockhart (Downey also making a fine comeback to comedy in a well-suited performance tailor made for his fast-talking, sharp minded spite) who winds up an unlikely actor wanna be when a Christmas-time burglary attempt has the pursued by cops Harry bolting unannounced into a late-night film audition where he finds himself overwrought with guilt of his partner's demise which adds hilarity to his 'motive' when he reads the script shoved into his hands which just happens to be a policier (!) and the casting agent Dabney Shaw(funnyman scene-stealer Miller) hires him on the spot.Harry is next whisked to sunny LA by Shaw for meet-and-greets to create serious buzz and enlists the unexpected thief a lesson to be a detective with Shaw's for hire gumshoe "Gay" Perry (Kilmer equally having a ball and a natural flair for tongue-in-cheek humor), a tougher than he appears homosexual who is reluctant to have the flaky Harry tag-along to get notes for his 'character'.
Partnered with private detective Gay Perry (Kilmer), who is to show him the ropes for the part he's to play, things turn just a little weird when dead bodies start turning up in his life Shane Black's first venture into big feature film directing is a master class of genre bending bravado.
Well, that's definitely the case with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a film that tries to revive the buddy cops, noir, and postmodern film movement, as well as the careers of director Shane Black and actors Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer.Don't get me wrong.
this movie is one of the only ones i've seen that actually IS all of those things.val kilmer and robert downey jr.
But it has to do with crook Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) running form the law, finding himself cast as a private eye in a movie and getting the help of a real gumshoe, Gay Perry (Val Kilmer).