KISS KISS, BANG BANG: A Very (Shane) Black Christmas!

One of the more exhaustively discussed recent trends in the film industry is the sudden rise and complete dominance that Marvel Studios, The Walt Disney Company, and superhero movies at large have on the current market. There are little pieces of data to suggest that the stranglehold may be loosening a bit (Phase 4 of the MCU has been notable more for its quantity than its quality), but the fact remains at this point in time that any sort of discussion of modern moviemaking must filter through the Avengers Academy first.

To that end, even the remaining industry titans of an older time are somehow linked more to capes and cowls than their actual body of work these days. The names “Martin Scorsese” and “Quentin Tarantino” can barely be discussed without their semi-recent comments about the MCU essentially not being their thing being analyzed, re-analyzed, then analyzed again for good measure.

Now, I’m not honestly and truly not here to re-litigate any of that conversation again, outside of mentioning that, in the pursuit of defending Earth’s Mightiest Heroes from detractors, it feels like people have started backing themselves into a position of profound un-curiosity? Take the rollout of the 2022 Sight & Sound list, as well as the reveal of individual director’s ballots, I’ve noticed there’s been a lot of eye-rolling about certain directors making “pretentious” picks. This would be a somewhat understandable criticism (cinema can be great without being esoteric), except the picks being referred to is shit like CASABLANCA or CHINATOWN, movies that were mainstream releases at the time and remain entirely accessible and straight-forward to this day. Are we just considering any movies made before we were born as “pretentious”?

No, I’m not here to get back into that exhausting topic. What I’m more interested in this week is “how did we get here?” I don’t mean, “what business practices and legislation got us to this point of Disney essentially having a populist monopoly on art?”. Those kinds of articles are always bleak treatises and ultimately left to those better suited to write them.

No, what I’m interested in is “what creative actions got us to this point in time?” What SUCCESSES led to the glut of superhero cinema??

The answer, of course, can be traced back to the summer of 2012, when THE AVENGERS proved that a shared universe can pay off big-time. Marvel Studios’ big risk yielded major dividends, both creatively and financially, as the star-studded ensemble proved their ability to play well together and its at-the-time major get in the director’s and writer’s chair gulp Joss Whedon proved his ability to allow everybody a moment to shine. The team-up film went on to make $200 million in its opening weekend, and was the highest-grossing movie in America (without adjusting for inflation, of course!) for about three years. The “shared continuity” era had begun in earnest.

But, of course, the groundwork for the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been put down years before then. The real start to all of this, then, was 2008’s IRON MAN, the summer blockbuster that officially marked the return to the limelight of troubled star Robert Downey Jr., in one of the more perfect and satisfying weldings of star and role of the 21st century. Silver-tongued, flawed, but ultimately endowed with the capacity for empathy, it’s arguable that this performance was the single most important factor in the MCU’s rise to popularity in the eyes of the general public, as well as in Kevin Feige being able to set up the general Marvel “formula”: zippy one-liner style humor performed by the most likable actors on the planet.

Except, even then, Downey Jr.’s comeback role wasn’t just given to him as an act of good faith. For major reclamation projects such as his (and people forget just how bad things were for RDJ at the turn of the new century), a smaller production has to stick its neck out and assume the potential risk first. Maybe, perhaps, a quirky project written and directed by a guy who was himself looking to pull himself from the Hollywood outs.

What I’m saying is that Shane Black’s 2005 directorial debut KISS KISS, BANG BANG is the reason you feel like movies are bad now. Merry Christmas!

KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005)

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan, Val Kilmer, Corbin Bernsen

Directed by: Shane Black

Written by: Shane Black

Released: October 21, 2005

Length: 103 minutes

Like most twisty mystery movies, the plot of KISS KISS BANG BANG is difficult to expound upon without giving away many of its surprises. The brass tacks: Harry Lockhart (Downey Jr.) is a wanna-be petty burglar whose latest job has just gone horribly wrong, leaving his partner dead in the streets. Searching for a place to hide from the cops, he barges into an audition room, where Hollywood casting director Dabney Shaw (the always great Larry Miller) is holding tryouts for a new picture. Thinking Harry is their next actor, they hand him sides and start running lines with him. He begins to show panic and remorse for the destruction he’s just run away from. The room loves his improvised energy, and he gets flown out to LA for a screen test.

Once he reaches the West Coast, Harry runs into his childhood crush, Harmony Lane (Monaghan), at a party. As the movie he’s auditioning for is a hardboiled detective thriller, Harry gets teamed up with “Gay” Perry (Kilmer), an actual L.A. detective, in order to give him some real-life experience and training. Their case? Staking out the cabin of actor Harlan Dexter, who has just settled a lawsuit filed by his daughter over the inheritance of his wife. What they find at his cabin sets off a chain of events that lead to Harry, Perry and Harmon(err)y running all around L.A. to solve a deadly mystery.

KISS KISS BANG BANG is narrated by Harry himself, and his verbal exposition is extremely self-aware. Harry is oftentimes a stumbling narrator, looping back around to events and details he forgot to mention, or jokingly skipping over certain parts of the story in order to come back to them at another time. More to the point, Harry seems to be fully aware that he's in a movie; he seems to be at peace with the fact that he exists as words on a page, here to tell a story. He’s also a world-class smart-ass, getting defensive and snarky when he trips himself up in his own story (he at one point goads us on after a fuck-up by saying “I don’t see another goddamn narrator, so pipe down”).

Now, much of what I just described is going to be anathema to a good time at the movies for some. Meta cuteness paired with writery smart-aleck one-liners isn’t going to sit well with everybody (a good litmus test as to your enjoyment of KISS KISS BANG BANG to gauge your immediate reaction to the line “don’t quit your gay job”). But if you DO like these kind of playful, self-aware films, it’s hard to think of one from the 21st century as effortless as this one. It definitely helps that Downey Jr. is uniquely suited for the kind of loopy, almost hostile narration that Black employs throughout his script.

Robert Downey Jr. is maybe one of the most effortlessly sarcastic onscreen presences in Hollywood right now, and has been for some time. Humor has been a major tool for him both on and off the screen, and his ability to laugh at the mess that was this point in his life is probably his greatest weapon against relapse that he possesses. His true gift in front of a camera, however, is his ability to be likable no matter how abrasive his character may be. He always finds the humanity in cads. It’s why an entire multi-film franchise was able to be built off of his Tony Stark performance. His performance in KISS KISS BANG BANG is no different, and it’s hard to oversell just how important it was for the second half of his career for him that he nailed this.

IRON MAN was his comeback in the eyes of the public. KISS KISS BANG BANG, however, was his comeback in the eyes of Hollywood executives.

Ironically, like all monumental decisions, the one made to cast RDJ as the lead here was made almost arbitrarily. Yes, prior to his run-ins with the law and his struggles with addiction, Downey Jr. had already transcended his status as a nepotism product, and was already well-established as a performer capable of anchoring a complete movie. However, in 2005, the major reason he was chosen as the lead of KISS KISS BANG BANG was that he was cheap, and would fit right into the film’s $15 million budget. He only got into the audition room at all due to him finding out about the project from his then-girlfriend Susan Levin, then leveraging his relationship with producer Joel Silver. He read well, and the rest was history.

KISS KISS BANG BANG was a redemption project for its writer and director as well. As mentioned in last week’s article, the relative failure of THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT effectively iced Shane Black’s career for almost a decade. The crack in his armor seemed to open up the floodgates to critics, perhaps eager to finally execute the Machismo Action Genre that had engulfed Hollywood in the 80’s and 90’s. Burned out and formally rejected by the Academy, Black wouldn’t return to the action genre until the next century. The script began its life as something more resembling a rom-com, and was being guided by James L. Brooks. Somewhere along the way, it morphed into more of an action romp with little tweaks and twists, a sign that Black was returning to his roots.

The biggest subversion was the addition of “Gay” Perry. Even in 2005, it was rare to really see a gay character in a film being played without affectation, let alone as a real action heavy of a movie (hell, it still is). Yes, there are many barbs about his sexuality thrown his way, but none of them really rise higher than the level of “male peers cracking on each other”. There’s no real loss of agency or respect towards Perry. If anything, others’ discomfort with his very existence tends to play to his advantage; one henchman’s refusal to search him thoroughly leads to one of the movie’s most memorable jokes.

So there’s a little bit of a risk involved with this project, to say the least. You have a writer and director whose last film was over a decade ago that happened to be a flop (although as it was posited in last week’s article, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT might have been a victim of CUTTHROAT ISLAND’s historic failure), you have a star who was only allowed back into movies at all because fucking Mel Gibson paid the insurance on him for 2003’s THE SINGING DETECTIVE, and a major gay role front and center. Although a summer blockbuster it was not, the stakes were still unusually high for a slick mystery riff.

And it was all worth it. It’s true that didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, although it did basically break even. But with a movie like this, you’re mostly concerned if it still has any juice at all. You worry if a decade-long hiatus would have sapped Black’s unique sense of fun, rhythm, and function. Maybe he’s lost it, maybe the rust would show. But, nope, it’s like he never left. If anything, the only noticeable difference between this and his previous film THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is the reduction in budget and, more specifically, scale. No more large explosions or stunt-work on this one; instead, KISS KISS BANG BANG is forced to be more of a wry, sarcastic character-based murder mystery. The focus is more on the dialogue and the ways the personalities of our core three characters propel things than it is on spectacle. Most of the violence is meant to be surprising, maybe even a little funny.

Actually, the whole movie is funny in ways you don’t always expect. Like pretty much all of Black’s previous films, KISS KISS BANG BANG plays with the conventions and tropes of action flicks by playing on your expectations, then twisting them. You know you’ve seen scenes of characters getting saved from a bullet by something significant in their breast pocket, and KISS KISS BANG BANG knows you have too. So it provides you a scene like that….then pulls the rug out from under you. The entirety of the movie kind of plays like that, and it runs the risk of feeling exhausting if it didn’t feel so light on its feet.

It draws some career-best performances from its principals. Besides setting Downey back on track, Kilmer is also great as the “Murtaugh” to RDJ’s “Riggs”. Kilmer is one of those guys who said “yes” to too many projects over his career, which dilutes his good performances, but at his best, he has a understated quality about him that makes him “cool” in the best way. And Michelle Monaghan (one year before she would become a recurring MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE player), is terrific as Melody, a role that might have lost some agency if played by a less captivating performer. At once bitterly sarcastic and wildly vulnerable, she’s the perfect counterpoint to RDJ’s antics.

It’s tempting to call KISS KISS BANG BANG a spin on a noir, but I don’t know how noir-ish it really is, at least in a cinematic sense. Its bigger influence appears to be the dime-store detective novella. The script was based off of a 1941 Brett Halliday novel, BODIES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM. As well, there’s a fictional Raymond Chandler-esque writer who , although more or less unseen in the actual movie, has a body of work that serves as the catalyst for most of the plot’s beginning actions. Most fun of all, as a final nod to Chandler, KISS KISS BANG BANG is split into chapters with pulpy titles that just so happen to correlate to various Chandler novels.

Now, I must admit that the Christmassy-ness of KISS KISS BANG BANG is a little lacking in comparison to Black’s prior film THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT. For one, we’re back in Los Angeles, a profoundly un-Christmassy town (sorry, everybody). Winter permeates the whole thing, and there are little nods throughout to indicate which season this tale is set in; Monaghan wears a particularly infamous seasonal outfit. But you just can’t have the kind of snowy goodness that you want from a true holiday movie (this may be the single greatest argument against DIE HARD being a Christmas movie, a conclusion I remain unconvinced of).

On the other hand, perhaps an L.A. Christmas is more in the Shane Black tradition anyway. I think about an answer he once gave to the “why Christmas, anyway?” question he probably gets quite often:

I […] think that Christmas is just a thing of beauty, especially as it applies to places like Los Angeles, where it's not so obvious, and you have to dig for it, like little nuggets. One night, on Christmas Eve, I walked past a Mexican lunch wagon serving tacos, and I saw this little string, and on it was a little broken plastic figurine, with a light bulb inside it, of the Virgin Mary. And I thought, that's just a little hidden piece of magic. You know, all around the city are little slices, little icons of Christmas, that are as effective and beautiful in and of themselves as any 40-foot Christmas tree on the lawn of the White House.

And that’s what KISS KISS BANG BANG is to me: a little hidden piece of magic inside the beginning of the history of the most successful film franchise in the history of the medium (not adjusted for inflation, of course). And of course, both Black and Downey Jr. would be rewarded for their good work here.

About eight years later, Downey Jr. was firmly in the middle of the most incredible career renaissance in recent modern history. IRON MAN and THE AVENGERS were lucrative successes, and it was time to start making another round of Marvel movies. It was here that RDJ found a way to repay the favor Black did for him earlier in the decade. Because as it happened, IRON MAN 3 was the first Marvel sequel that suddenly found itself in need of a director…