Though the second act of Robert Downey Jr.’s career truly took off with 2008’s Iron Man, the film that set the stage for that comeback actually arrived three years earlier, with Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The actor’s well-publicized legal troubles and issues with addiction made him a difficult figure in the entertainment industry, but somehow Black created the perfect star vehicle to begin to bring him back to Hollywood. In the vein of Black’s other screenplays, like Lethal Weapon or The Long Kiss Goodnight, the movie is self-referential and playful with genre conventions (while never going full Quentin Tarantino), in addition to being an exciting mystery that also knows how to pull a lampshade over its convoluted plotting. The most fitting part of it for Downey is Black’s hilarious and fast-paced dialogue, which let the always fast-on-his-feet actor show his capability with line delivery.
More than any other Shane Black film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an old-school pulp mystery, with Downey playing Harry, a petty criminal whose circumstances lead him to Hollywood in a cheeky way. He stumbles into an audition while on the run, and his clear desperation makes him look like a method actor. The movie’s sense of parody effectively comes from an inside baseball look at the industry, as most of its targets are mainstays of Hollywood lore: older successful men who seem to have everything, and younger women whose yearning for a way in to the industry leads them to a dark place. With the feel of a James Ellroy novel at times, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang throws viewers into a complicated mystery with secret identities, childhood trauma, and a world-weary cynicism that’s only bolstered by how deeply funny the movie is.
‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ Is A Subversive Hollywood Mystery
Shane Black’s love of detective novels is only rivaled by his love of Christmas and Los Angeles, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang finally let him explore a full-on detective mystery — one a little less intense than the action excess of The Long Kiss Goodnight or The Last Boy Scout. Like most of his other scripts, it centers on a buddy cop duo dynamic, where one man is more experienced and the other is more of a chaos agent (and the two spend most of the movie learning to like each other, as the genre goes). The key difference in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is that the chaos agent at first has no sense of how deep the mystery goes, and gets thrown into its depths. Harry is just an aspiring actor, and for how much Robert Downey Jr. imbues him with a sense of street smarts and world weariness, he has none of the professional know-how of “Gay” Perry (Val Kilmer), the private detective he’s tasked with shadowing for his role.
When they discover a young woman’s body being dumped in a lake, Harry and Perry embark on a journey to discover the truth as Harry reconnects with childhood love Harmony (Michelle Monaghan), who also might have some connection to the mystery. For all the complex conspiracies at the movie’s center, everything ultimately comes back to the suggestive title. It’s a story of two relationships, one romantic and one platonic and mission-driven. The fun of watching Harry and Harmony’s rekindling of sparks, even when she seems to be the most dangerous kind of film noir femme fatale, is one of the reasons the movie works so well. The other is Downey, who, like Black, was coming off a career low point before the making of the film. The movie does the parody trick of both making fun of the genre tropes while also playing them fairly straight, and Downey’s ear for fast-paced, clever dialogue was never better put to use.
‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ Was A Redemption Moment for Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr.
Shane Black had had a rough couple of years professionally in the lead up to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, with the flop of 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight occurring alongside reports that he had received a $4 million payday for the script, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Kiss Kiss let him prove himself as an artist by showing for the first time that he could direct as well as write, and especially by working with an actor as established — and professionally in exile — as Downey. Though Downey, in fact, wasn’t the first choice for the role of Harry; it was almost Jackass legend Johnny Knoxville, according to JoBlo reports from 2004.
The public scandals of his addiction relapses and time in jail throughout the late ‘90s made him hard to market a film around, and effectively put his career on skids around the same time as Black’s. But it meant both men could work relatively cheaply, and Downey returned the favor to Black nearly a decade later by reaching out to him to direct 2013’s Iron Man 3, giving him the biggest hit of his career while letting him be one of the few directors to put an original stamp on a Marvel movie.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is streaming on Prime Video.
