>>REVIEW
KISS KISS, BANG BANG
STARRING Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan
DIRECTED BY Shane Black
Opens Friday, November 11
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Punchy, vulgar and hyperbolically macho, the words of Shane Black have punctuated the conversations of unrepentantly juvenile males since he scripted 1987’s Lethal Weapon. As the writer of the most excessive Hollywood action flicks of the late ’80s and ’90s, Black became notorious – and extremely rich, earning as much as $4 million US a script – for profanity-laden dialogue that played like David Mamet at a kegger.
Years before Quentin Tarantino supposedly reinvented tough-guy talk, Black was ripping apart clichés and inventing new ones with the same gusto. Lines like, "if you even look at her funny, I’m gonna shove an umbrella up your ass and open it" (The Last Boy Scout) and "the last time I got blown, candy bars cost a nickel" (The Long Kiss Goodnight) never fail to warm my heart. And who could ever forget Lethal Weapon’s Sgt. Murtagh’s ageless lament, "I’m getting too old for this shit?"
But ol’ Murtagh, his sufferings cruelly extended in a string of sequels, almost outlasted Black himself. After The Long Kiss Goodnight flopped in 1996, the writer slipped under the radar. For the next eight years, there were rumours of burn-out and writer’s block. His name was forgotten by everyone but the sort of dudes who insisted Last Action Hero – on which Black had final rewrite honours – was underrated. Much imitated but rarely outgunned, Black was due for a second act.
It arrives with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a detective comedy that Black not only wrote but directed. Clearly enjoying his own rehabilitation, Robert Downey Jr. plays Harry Lockhart, a shambling petty thief from New York who ends up in a Hollywood murder mystery. Harry’s the kind of character who’d be nowhere without a buddy – here, that role is fulfilled by Val Kilmer as a bisexual P.I. who goes by the name of Gay Perry. The caper plotline’s a mess and the movie veers wildly between the daringly clever and the outrageously dumb (I’m still not sure if I’m more appalled by the flagrant desecration of several corpses or by the inevitable inclusion of a cute dog ), but the dialogue could be none more Black. To wit:
Perry: "Look up the word ‘idiot’ in the dictionary and you know what you’ll find?"
Harry: "A picture of me?"
Perry: "No, the definition of the word ‘idiot,’ which you are."
Shane, it’s so nice to have you back.
During an interview at The Cannes Film Festival, where Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang debuted in May, the 43-year-old Black exudes manly pride.
"I was just so happy to have finished a script," he says. "For a long time, I couldn’t. Finally I sat down and got it written over about a year and a half. Then I tried to sell it myself with little success. I found out that whatever cachet I’d accumulated as a writer was not necessarily reflected in the current view. So I took it to this guy." He points to the man next to him, producer Joel Silver, who launched Black’s career with Lethal Weapon nearly two decades before. "It was almost like the scene in Boogie Nights when Mark Wahlberg goes back to Burt Reynolds," cracks Black. "I said, ‘Hey, please, I need this fucking script made and I need it done right.’ The movie happened not because of me but because this guy made a decision that no one else was willing to make, to guarantee the $15 million it took to put this on screen, to trust me enough and to trust the material enough."
Darkly comic and authentically lurid, the material proves Black’s love of detective fiction – the movie’s chapter titles are even borrowed from the titles of Raymond Chandler novels. Inspired by thoughts of how Chandler might write about Los Angeles if he were around today, Black presents the city as a smoky neon blur of showbiz parties and seedy clubs.
"My only regret is that I caught maybe a 10th of how fucking perverted the whole disgusting mess is there," says Black. "If I could just go back and take another swing I could maybe get it. But no one would see the movie – they’d be so turned off."
Harry’s spiky, self-reflexive narration calls to mind the patter of hard-boiled icons like Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, although Black tweaks the formula by enlisting a very different kind of detective as his hero.
"He isn’t slick, tough-talking and witty," says Black. "He keeps fucking up. He has his own narration but he can’t even correctly tell his own tale."
Examining the gulf between real life and fiction – a theme that’s positively Last Action Hero-esque – was one of Black’s primary intentions.
"A lot of the movie is about our inability to live up to the standards of our fictional idols," he says. "Until, for whatever reason, we suddenly do – in a moment of crisis, we create a kind of magic and we become the myth, the hero that we’ve worshipped. Even though it’s fucking impossible, we do it anyway."
Black’s bold re-emergence from career oblivion has a similarly supernatural air. Then again, most of us can’t count Joel Silver as a loyal patron. While Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang may or may not reconnect him with the masses who used to parrot his lines, he’s happy to be cranking them out again. When asked what’s next, Black quips,
"I’m gonna break out the typewriter, dust off the cobwebs and then hit my head with it a couple hundred times."
He sounds even more like one of his characters when a People magazine reporter at my table asks Black if he’s witnessed anything of the seedier side of the party scene at Cannes or the Hotel Du Cap, the famously luxurious hotel at which he’s staying.
"You’ve gotta show me it," he says in his typically jocular manner. "Meet me in the bar later – I wanna see it. Answer me a question. You’ve seen them in the lobby – are those hookers or what? They sit in the corner, these girls in low-cut dresses. Are they pros or aren’t they?"
Sadly, no one has an answer for him. |
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