A Very (Shane) Black Christmas: and an IRON MAN 3 New Year!

People don’t really like feeling like a movie is messing with them.

The last five years has blessed (cursed) all of us with near-constant STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI arguments, even for people don’t give two shits about the now-sort-of-floundering space franchise. There are lots and lots of reasons why that particular blockbuster was so divisive that it still feels like people can’t shut the fuck up about it, but one of the most telling insights into why it rubbed people the wrong way actually came from a Film Crit Hulk treatise on the movie’s many unheralded virtues:

I was having a conversation with one of my local bartenders I love. We’ve had a lot of lovely, spirited bar arguments. Sports. Movies. You name it. And it’s always been fun and inclusive. But The Last Jedi is the first time I have ever seen him incensed. He kept yelling at us and talking about all the things that were so “stupid” about the film, and then proclaiming that the director “clearly doesn’t understand the tone of Star Wars!” He made this point particularly about the sense of humor in the opening Poe scene. It didn’t matter that I pointed out the tone was no different from Han’s off-the-cuff joke, “everything’s fine here… how are you?” as well as a litany of other moments. He finally just yelled, “I felt like the film was making fun of me!”

This sentiment of “that movie was making fun of me!” was expressed by others at the time. Cheo Hodari Coker, the show runner behind the Netflix LUKE CAGE series, went off at length in a Twitter thread (that I naturally can no longer find) about how the moment where THE LAST JEDI resolves THE FORCE AWAKENS' “cliffhanger” by having Luke toss his lightsaber off said cliff made him feel mocked for caring about that moment in the first place.

Now, I would argue that there’s no other way for that moment to resolve (imagine if THE LAST JEDI opened with Luke grabbing his lightsaber, telling Rey “let’s go”, and then wreaking havoc on the First Order, with the whole thing wrapping up in ten minutes; what a great movie!!!!), but Coker isn’t a stupid man, nor is he coming from a place of bad faith. He’s a smart and insightful creative and Star Wars fan who wanted to like Episode 8. And he didn’t. It’s worth paying attention to.

He didn’t like the feeling of being messed with. Nor did Film Crit Hulk’s bartender friend. Nor did many of the smart people I know who also didn’t like THE LAST JEDI very much. It’s what it is.

Of course, blockbuster sequels being spear-headed by filmmakers with a unique sensibility that immediately piss off half the audience by screwing with the format is nothing new. In the wake of the unprecedented blockbuster success of THE AVENGERS, it was time for Marvel Studios to begin its next phase of solo films to build up to the next team-up. First on deck: a third IRON MAN solo movie. After an extremely well-liked first installment in 2008, and a major step down in quality in 2010 with IRON MAN 2, Marvel needed to take a big swing to energize the franchise that started it all. And star/executive producer/mega-string-puller Robert Downey Jr. knew just the guy.

Enter Shane Black.

IRON MAN 3

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Ben Kingsley

Directed by: Shane Black

Written by: Black, Drew Pearce

Released: May 3, 2013

Length: 131 minutes

A year after the events of The Battle of New York, Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is in a bad place. It turns out he never really recovered from his trip into space at the end of THE AVENGERS, nor from his confirmation that aliens exist and they want to kill us. He’s easily triggered into panic attacks, he’s mindlessly building iron suits in his basement and, most of all, he’s freaking Pepper Potts (Paltrow) out.

He’s picked a bad time to have PTSD, though, because there’s a new global threat out there, and his name is The Mandarin (Kingsley). He has the ability to hijack all U.S. television stations at any time to broadcast his taunting, disturbing messages; he also appears to have the ability to wreak havoc at will, setting off bombs and striking terror into the hearts of every American.

On top of everything else, a ghost from Stark’s playboy past appears to be returning to haunt him. Back in 1999, during a New Year’s Eve party in Switzerland, Stark blows off Aldrich Killian (Pearce), the awkward and disabled creator of the fledgling Advanced Idea Mechanics company, in order to make time with geneticist Maya Hansen (Hall), whose work on a project named Extremis may have unlocked the key to tissue regeneration. Now in 2013, Killian, who looks healthy, youthful and revitalized, returns to Stark Industries with an offer. AIM has taken off and he’s now trying head-hunt Pepper Potts to come work for him. Meanwhile, Hansen returns to Stark to inform him she works for AIM now, which means Killian has his hands on Extremis.

Jon Favreau (who also continues to play Happy Hogan both in this and in the MCU at large) was the original architect of the IRON MAN franchise, having directed the first two installment. However, Favreau tapped out of helming a third film by December 2010, opting instead to direct the never-completed MAGIC KINGDOM movie (no tears for Favreau, he’s clearly landed on his feet). Although he remained an executive producer on THE AVENGERS, IRON MAN 3 was going to need a new captain at the head of the ship.

Not long after Favreau’s departure, Downey Jr. hopped on the phone to contact the man who helped revitalize his career nearly ten years before. By February 2011, Shane Black was in final negotiations to direct and write the third IRON MAN movie. By March, Black was the director and co-writer on the script with Drew Pearce, who would go on to co-write FAST AND FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBES & SHAW and would do the story for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION. A roller coaster of a career, indeed.

IRON MAN 3 found itself in an interesting slot in the MCU at that time. It not only had to follow up the ensemble success of THE AVENGERS, it also had to recover from the disappointment that was IRON MAN 2, a film that both collapsed under its own world-building weight (the movie just stops halfway through to re-introduce Nick Fury and Agent Coulson) and cast doubt that Marvel Studios was going to be able to handle its own ambitions.

But the Tony Stark threequel is largely a success! It’s a movie with things on its mind, even if it does have to remember its ultimate four-quadrant obligations at the end of the day. The whole thing with Rhodey’s War Machine (Cheadle) being re-skinned into a red-white-and-blue Iron Patriot in order to do overseas merc work for the U.S. government is an outrageously potent metaphor coming from a cinematic universe that would have to play ball with the Air Force a little over five years later.

It’s also maybe one of the only features in the MCU that portrays a character actually dealing with all the shit he’s seen? There are little nods here and there throughout the franchise to residual trauma; the feeling of loss hangs over ENDGAME, Thor gets a moment in INFINITY WAR to process everything that’s he’s faced, there’s WANDAVISION on the TV side of things. But here, Tony Stark’s ultimate arc is “getting over PTSD”, and it takes him until the end of the movie to really achieve that. It’s to IRON MAN 3’s credit that it takes Stark’s emotional fragility at face value. One of the worst things about modern franchise filmmaking is that the stories so often boil down to being power fantasies, the desire to see our heroes kick ass and be reassured about how cool it is that they’re kicking ass and how cool YOU are for watching them kick ass. Here, Tony Stark gets talked down from a panic attack by a kid he’s just met. It’s profoundly uncool. It’s great.

Shane Black and Drew Pearce also understands that Tony Stark is infinitely more interesting than Iron Man. It’s no mistake that the strongest stretch of the film by far is its middle section where Stark is alone and stranded in the middle of snowy Tennessee with said strange kid, completely stripped of his suit. He’s back to having to use his substantial wits and smarts to get himself back to the West Coast and save the day. It’s something that kind of got lost previously in IRON MAN 2, which felt like all suits, all the time. Seeing Stark become more of a detective is a blast, and it feels like a running back of the dynamic Downey Jr. got to play in KISS KISS BANG BANG.

Also, the Christmas aspect you’ve come to expect from a Shane Black movie is in full force, and ramps up a notch once the movie moves from Malibu to snowy Tennessee. Actually, IRON MAN 3 is one of the rare blockbusters that makes New Year’s Eve a crucial plot point; as mentioned above, the turning of the clock from 1999 to 2000 is sort of the beginning of the end for Stark here. We also get a fun Christmas track near the start of the movie, a remix of “Jingle Bells” by Joe Williams. It can't hold a candle to THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT’s X-Mas factor but it ranks high, especially since Marvel hadn’t really taken much advantage of seasonal moods up until really recently.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that IRON MAN 3 is an oasis of musical identity in a franchise that has famously been accused of lacking it. Specifically, it features absolutely the grooviest end-credits music in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, a fitting Brian Tyler track that sums up the mood and swerve of the movie as much as anything else. Why, yes, I can dig it!

Of course, IRON MAN 3 isn’t perfect. At 130 minutes, it’s a long movie that feels longer; whether that’s a result of Black being given a higher budget and ramping up the spectacle and CGI in response, or just a symptom of the bloated franchise threequel is debatable (it’s likely a mix of both). There’s also some weird moments that only make sense if you keep up with Marvel’s corporate machinations; you’d be forgiven for not knowing that the only reason the movie introduces us to Wang Xuequi’s Dr. Wu in the first scene, only to never see him again until the closing seconds, is to serve an alternate Chinese cut of the film where Dr. Wu pimps out milk drinks and local industrial companies.

Then there’s the most famous thing about the movie, the moment that endures in conversation after a decade, a moment that to some degree the MCU is still trying to deal with.

That would be the Mandarin twist.

Specifically, it’s the revelation that the big, scary, bin Laden-esque Mandarin character is, in reality, a drunk, loser actor named Trevor Slattery, nothing more than a puppet for the REAL bad guys operating in the shadows. It’s notable the wild swing Kingsley takes in his performance here, going from cool and calculated in the beginning, to a broad, burping, nearly cross-eyed cartoon character by the end.

Needless to say, many people were pissed. To get an idea of the general sentiment, check out the Honest Trailer for IRON MAN 3 sometime. It wasn’t a universal opinion, but it seemed to me that even people who liked the movie seemed to hate that moment (my 2013 memories are a little fuzzy, but as I recall, the group I saw it with was split right down the middle on it).

The reason I hear most often to explain the distaste for this decision is that it wiped out a major villain from the comics and replaced him with both a cartoonish asshole and a bland, unsatisfying corporate baddie. However, I have to wonder if it just goes back to the idea of not wanting to feel messed with. Here I am, really enjoying this modern update to a somewhat problematic comic arch-nemesis, and then the rug gets pulled from under me. How is that fair?

With about ten years of reflection, I can concede that the Mandarin twist falls short of something like THE LAST JEDI’s anti-twist regarding Rey’s parentage, a move that built carefully towards the film’s greater point about the Force being accessible to everybody, even a wayward orphan girl on the outskirts of the universe. Here, The Mandarin being a drug-addicted dork actor named Trevor is admittedly just a rug-pull for the sake of a rug-pull. “You thought he was this, but he’s actually this! Got you!” It also puts the film, and the MCU at large, in a hole it can’t quite get out of. As a result of this twist, there’s no longer a real compelling villain at the middle of it all (Killian ultimately doesn’t really fill the gap). It also took a major Marvel villain off the board, and the studio bought the twist back almost immediately with the ALL HAIL THE KING short before casting Tony Leung as the real Mandarin in SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS.

But, at the same time, the fact that Marvel allowed Black to do the rug-pull anyway showed a willingness of the studio to hand over the keys to a filmmaker to let him do his thing he was theoretically hired for. And that might be the most miraculous thing about IRON MAN 3: it’s most definitely a Shane Black film. It’s set during Christmas, it pairs our lead with an unlikely partner (at least for part of the film, and it’s naturally the best stretch), and it plays on your expectations of an action film with many moments of subversion built and baked into the script; it’s no surprise that the biggest laugh of the movie comes from a henchman suddenly pleading for his release, stating “I hate working here, they’re so weird”.

Another kinda beautiful thing about Black’s creation here: there’s not a whole lot of world-building for future MCU installments. It seems utterly impossible for a mega-franchise that can often feel like homework nowadays, but outside of maaaaybe a little tease towards Pepper becoming Rescue like five years later (bet you forgot that happened in ENDGAME) and Slattery’s big return in SHANG-CHI, there aren’t a whole lot of threads here that contribute to The Big Marvel Story. It’s a stand-alone swan song for Tony Stark as a solo lead.

If anything, IRON MAN 3 concludes by closing a door future movies would have to reopen. It ends with Tony Stark finally getting the shrapnel in his heart removed, and his arc reactor thrown into the ocean. Despite the final line of the movie being “I am Iron Man”, the heavy implication is that Stark is retiring the persona, his soul being finally freed of the ghosts of his past and the burdens of his present.

Of course, it will come as no surprise to see Iron Man zip-zap-zopping away in the air the next time we see him, in the opening minutes of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. The Big Marvel Story At Work! I tease, but it does take some of the punch out of a movie’s bold storytelling choice when the next guy has to undo or completely ignore them (another parallel to be drawn here to STAR WARS’ final two chapters).

Still, IRON MAN 3 takes its place next to CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, THE AVENGERS, THOR: RAGNAROK, BLACK PANTHER and the two GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films as the list of Marvel Cinematic Universe films that feel completely and truly informed by the man behind the camera (note: this doesn’t mean these are the only good ones, nor is it necessarily slander against the ones not listed, please no fights going into the new year).

It was also enough of a success to bring Black back to his rightful place as the oddball writer of Hollywood. 2016’s THE NICE GUYS and 2018’s THE PREDATOR would follow; one was quite beloved, the other…wasn’t, but completely missing sometimes is the consequence of taking big swings.

The MCU has changed a lot since 2013, some for good (the makeup of their on and offscreen talent has finally diversified; they admittedly nailed the landing with ENDGAME) and some for bad (the fact that Scorsese has to take a meeting with Iger like some sort of mafioso every time he lodges a valid complaint about the MCU; the CGI is starting to look really rushed, a consequence of their actively hostile business practices). As the portfolio of lead heroes kept expanding (and Downey Jr.s’ price tag kept rising), we never did get another movie with Tony Stark as the lead. You sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had gotten an IRON MAN 4 with a returning Shane Black at the helm.

Then again, you take a look at something like THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER and you start to recognize that sometimes lightning in a bottle is just that.

Maybe messing with everybody once was enough.

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…

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT: A (Shane) Black Christmas Continues

Jennifer Lawrence recently got into trouble with the Twitterati due to a quote from her Actors on Actors video with Viola Davis for Variety in which she allegedly claimed that prior to THE HUNGER GAMES, “nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie” before. People were quick to point out that this is a literally untrue statement, citing such past female action icons as Ellen Ripley, Leia Organa and Sarah Conner (although it should be said that everybody seemingly mentioning the same three characters over and over isn’t the “epic clap back” as people are intending it to be).

In context, this dubious quote from Lawrence seemed more like a misspeak than anything else, with her intent being more in regards to studios’ heavy reluctance to trust in the box office power of a female-driven action film than some sort of unearned claim to history; she cited nerves in the moment to her bungled quote, although it really did little to change Lawrence’s current location in the Internet-build-up-then-tear-down cycle.

Regardless of what she did or didn’t mean to say or not say, even if Katniss Everdeen isn’t the literal first female action hero, it’s undeniable that studios are often still so unwilling to move forward with these kinds of films (even though people seem to like them and can list them off at the drop of a hat!). More to the point, they seem to so often undercut them when it comes time to market them. It’s a shame, too, because there’s lots of fun examples of the kind of female-led action film that quite frankly should be way more normalized than they are.

Once again, enter Shane Black.

Black’s career had been going swimmingly since the box office success of LETHAL WEAPON. Since then, he penned the story for 1989’s LETHAL WEAPON 2 and the scripts for 1987’s MONSTER SQUAD, 1991’S THE LAST BOY SCOUT, and 1993’s LAST ACTION HERO. Yep, even by 1993, the macho blockbuster was already entering its “ironic meta-parody” era.

Then came 1996’s THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, the kind of movie that you would think audiences would have been starved for at the time. In a decade and a half dominated by greased-up muscle guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, here comes an action movie starring….Geena Davis! It’s the perfect type of genre subversion, the kind of thing that makes you turn your head at the poster going, “Huh? Thelma’s packing heat again?”

As it turns out, audiences really didn’t care, at least not as much as many of the film’s stakeholders were hoping for. The movie kinda came and went after about a month. There are lots of reasons as to why (a big one being that Geena Davis was currently one of the faces of one of the biggest Hollywood flops of all time; more on that later!), but the movie’s relative failure had some pretty significant consequences for the trajectory of the action genre at large.

For instance: if you take a look at Black’s filmography after 1996, you’ll notice almost a decade goes by before he made another film. This is because THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT was considered a major shortcoming by his standards. After that, a confluence of culture shifts and bad timing kept him on hiatus well into the 2000’s, until a new confluence of culture shifts and good timing brought him back to the top.

That’s all a story for another time. For now, does THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT deserve its sort-of-bomb status? Not on your life. If anything, I think more people would be surprised how fun it is if they gave it a shot.

I think you would be, too. Let’s get into it.

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT (1996)

Starring: Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Cox, Craig Bierko, David Morse

Directed by: Renny Harlin

Written by: Shane Black

Released: October 11, 1996

Length: 121 minutes

In many regards, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is a movie that works best if you know as little as possible about it going in, so if you haven’t watched it, you may want to consider knocking it out before reading this. Or don’t! It’s Christmas time, who am I to tell you what to do?

The starting conceit: Samantha Caine (Davis) is an ordinary housewife that has been living in a nondescript town in the Upper Midwest with her daughter and a long-term boyfriend for the past eight years. What was she doing before then? Well, she doesn’t know. The first memory she can recall is being found pregnant on a New Jersey beach. That’s it; anything before then is completely gone. She’s tried to get some insight via a series of private detectives, but to no avail. Maybe the newest one, Mitch Henessey (Jackson), will have more luck.

One night, near Christmas, Samantha gets into a car accident and suffers a concussion. When she comes to, she discovers she suddenly has a ton of skill with a knife, both cutting and throwing.

As it happens, it turns out Samantha Caine used to be “Charly”, a highly trained, platinum blonde CIA assassin who went missing eight years ago. From there, it’s up to Samantha/Charly and Henessey to determine why she disappeared in the first place, as well as what the people who are now after her are up to. By the way, what the hell is “Project Honeymoon”?

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is a movie with excess on its mind, although it should be noted that the explosions and wild knife stuff is paired with an extremely functional screenplay that only gives you as much information as you need at any given point, and a plot that all hangs together, but can either be tuned in or out of as you please. At its core, the two leads have a dynamic not unlike the one between Murtaugh and Riggs in LETHAL WEAPON, but with some significant subversions, which we’ll talk about in a second. The movie is comfortable, but also keeps you on your toes. It also threatens to collapse at any moment.

The reason that it doesn’t is because of Geena Davis.

Davis’ career had already been marked by an ability to play any type of role, appearing in such diverse genres of films as TOOTSIE, THE FLY, BEETLEJUICE, THELMA & LOUISE and A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, the latter two juicing her early 90’s career peak. The pivot to action star, though, was a relatively new thing for her, fueled a little by her recent marriage to director Renny Harlin.

I genuinely don’t know if THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT would have worked without her grounding it (at least, as much as it allows itself to be grounded). Yes, you definitely buy her way more than you think you will as the CIA assassin. But without you COMPLETELY buying her as a beleaguered housewife in the movie’s opening act, this whole thing might have been dead on arrival. As it happens, Davis gives you both, infusing this jacked up action hero with a palpable maternal sense. The end result is a genuine cult classic.

Another thing that makes THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT so much fun (and sneakily subversive) is its complete swap of the traditional gender dynamic. In this film, Samuel L. Jackson and Geena Davis are more or less “buddy cops”, which is sort of fun considering they’re not really cops, and they’re not really buddies, at least not at the start. But, as it goes along, you start noticing that Henessey is the damsel-in-distress here, the character that gets proposed to be bait for the bad guys, the one that needs to be rescued by the macho action hero. Davis, on the other hand, is constantly the one “in charge”, the “man with a gun”. She’s even given the action-hero physique; take a look at her arms in the surprisingly harrowing torture sequence where she’s tied to the water wheel; she looks jacked.

Looked through this prism, then, it’s no wonder it’s so exciting whenever Charly gets to take over, leaving Samantha the housewife (and all that she represents) in the dust.

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is also a surprisingly prescient movie. “Project Honeymoon”, the bad guys’ big bad evil master plan, turns out to be a plot to conduct a false flag operation, with the idea to detonate a chemical bomb at Niagara Falls and blame it on Islamic terrorism. If you think that particular storyline sounds far-fetched, run it by your weird cousin at Christmas later this week and see what he thinks.

Finally, it’s also littered with people you like from other things. The always great Brian Cox (aka the guy from that HBO show I haven’t watched yet) is in a key role as Nathan Waldman, the man who trained Charly to be the efficient killer she once was. David Morse appears in a small but crucial part as a former mark. After some thinking, I even realized I recognized Samantha’s daughter, Caitlin. She’s played by Yvonne Zima, who I knew as Rachel Greene’s daughter on the first half of ER. A killer lineup!

The only thing really holding THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT back from true greatness is that it feels a little long. It’s SO excessive and adrenaline-fueled that you’re totally wiped by the end. The 80’s/90’s action blow-’em-up blockbuster was starting to show its limitations just a bit in the middle of the 1990’s (which undoubtedly left it open to criticism from folks waiting for their chance to strike).

“But, Ryan, what about the Christmas factor???” So glad you asked. If anything, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is even more Christmassy than LETHAL WEAPON. No longer set in the warm valley of Los Angeles, Black sets this one in the snowy land of Honesdale, Pennsylvania (the fictional home of Schrute Beets, don’tcha know). The inciting incident is a giant small-town Christmas parade. Add a plethora of string lights and some diagetic holiday music, and you’ve got maybe the Christmassy-est non-Christmas movie of the entire goddamn 1990’s.

And yet, as mentioned, the movie was considered something of a failure at the time, making it to only third in the box office on opening weekend. THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT only managed about $33 mill in the United States and about $62 mill internationally for a combined total of $95, compared against its budget of…$65 mill. Yeah, it surprised me to learn that, for all the hand-wringing, the thing actually made money. It just wasn’t nearly enough as everybody was hoping.

Why was this? Well, there a few unique mitigating factors, perhaps none bigger than the fact that THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT was the second Renny Harlin-Geena Davis collaboration in about a year. The first was released the previous Christmas, a little movie called…..CUTTHROAT ISLAND, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest box-office bomb of all time. Bad time to get back on the horse.

Some, including Harlin himself, also put blame on the bad marketing, which I can’t speak a lot to: the trailer seems pretty straight-forward. There’s also something to be said to the fact that audiences and the media were starting to grow weary of “macho Hollywood”; the tide was starting to turn against guys like Black, who were perceived to be overpaid relative to the quality of his output. This was personified by a strange hit-piece from Variety’s Peter Bart after the script was sold in 1994. He sounded pretty pissed! People were hungry for a change, at least in the media.

However, Shane Black posits that it perhaps THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT might have been more successful had the gender roles been more traditional:

It might have made more money, they told me, but it had to be a woman. The lead had to be female.'

In the end, it’s probably a mix of all of the above. The fact is that it’s been proven to be enormously difficult to generate a fully original female-led action flick that is profitable enough for the studio that financed it (again, it should be noted that THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT made money, just not enough; it’s worth considering if the standard would have been so high if Sam Jackson had been in the lead).

For what it’s worth, Jackson himself has looked back on it pretty fondly, going so far to say that it was his favorite movie of his to re-watch. Given he makes 400 movies a year, that’s quite the praise. I’m surprised he didn’t say FARCE OF THE PENGUINS, but no matter.

Regardless, the damage was done. As mentioned, Black essentially went on a decade-long hiatus after this, becoming more well-known for his extravagant parties than FOR writing anything at all. Was it the fallout of the tide starting to turn on him (it should be noted that 1993’s LAST ACTION HERO wasn’t exactly a box office success, either)? Was it the end result of many bad production experiences with studios over the prior decade? Was it just another period of low productivity from a man known for such bouts of writer’s block? Probably a mix of it all.

It also marked a steady decline in Davis’ film output; the only role she played after this until 2009 was as Stuart Little’s mom in the STUART LITTLE trilogy (actually, it’s worse than that, she was voice only in the direct-to-DVD STUART LITTLE 3: CALL OF THE WILD). To be fair, she began to focus on TV after the turn of the century, headlining her own self-titled sitcom, as well as playing the president in 2006’s COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. But, you know, both those shows ran for a combined 40 episodes. Not great.

It’s hard not to read between the lines. Her pivot into the male world didn’t do as good as we decided it should, you’re now on the wrong side of 35…..see ya later.

It’s why I find it hard to muster up a lot of hatred for Jennifer Lawrence’s words earlier this month. Yes, she completely misspoke, but we’ve forgiven all kinds of gaffes from public figures before, at least from ones we’re not angling to tear down in that moment. The underlying intent and sentiment behind what she was trying (and failing) to express in the Variety video couldn’t be clearer once you really break it down.

It’s still damn near impossible to come up with more than a handful of female action characters that exist as wholly original creations, and not part of some previously existing intellectual property. It’s why it;s crucial we appreciate the ones we do have, even if they were considered underwhelming at the time.

This Christmas, consider taking a trip to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, won’t you?

LETHAL WEAPON: A Very (Shane) Black Christmas!

A CHRISTMAS STORY. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. HOME ALONE. NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION. WHITE CHRISTMAS.

The “official” Christmas film canon is somewhat brief, if nevertheless solid. It’s become a lucrative and expansive genre in recent years, thanks to The Hallmark Channel’s infamous churning out of approximately two billion Christmas movies a week, a business practice so hacky that making jokes about it has actually become hacky.

I think the reason the Official Christmas Movie Nice List has become so hallowed is because there doesn’t seem to be that many of them. Halloween provides so many opportunities for watch-list customization due to the fact that horror and suspense thrillers are their own year-round genre. Anything can be watched in the month of October if it passes the “spooky season” vibe check. GET OUT? Halloween movie. THE SHINING? Halloween movie. SUSPIRIA? Halloween movie. HALLOWEEN? Fourth of July movie. Just kidding. Halloween movie.

Christmas, though? Generally speaking, a Christmas movie has to at the very least have one scene that is set on the actual holiday in question. At least one door has to have a wreath or something on it. However, for most people, it seems, Christmas has to be the defining theme of the film for it to count as a “Christmas movie”. It has to be the reason any of these characters are even talking to each other. People all have their own defining lines, but generally, what constitutes a Christmas movie is limited for most.

And that’s a shame for me! One of my great cinematic joys are movies that simply use Christmas as a window dressing for the rest of its story. Christmas as a dramatic vessel, if you will. The “non-Christmas Christmas” movie. It’s an easy way to expand the field of holiday movies and include some of the best, sweetest and most fun films ever made.

And nobody in Hollywood does the “non-Christmas Christmas movie” better than Shane Black. One of the big action screenwriters to come out of the 80’s/90’s blockbuster-issance, Black stood ahead of his peers by having a palpable, almost satiric sense of humor. Where others like Joe Eszterhas made his millions with bullets and greased-up breasts (both male and female), Black wrote his scripts almost like a meta-novel; within his LETHAL WEAPON screenplay, he once described a drug lord’s mansion as “the kind of house I’ll buy if this movie is a huge hit”.

And he loves Christmas! It’s become a staple of A Shane Black Joint to be arbitrarily set during the holidays. Hell, his scripts and movies didn’t even need to be released particularly near December 25th. They can come out in March, May, whenever. Characters are still wearing Santa hats, no matter what.

To honor the strange career arc of this blessedly goofy guy, this month has been declared A Very (Shane) Black Christmas! And there’s no better place to start than the movie that really put “Black the Screenwriter” on the map, the script that featured that aforementioned mansion.

Let’s roll the calendar back to 1987 and revisit LETHAL WEAPON, starring Danny Glover and…..

….uh-oh.

Is it too late for me to ch—-

LETHAL WEAPON

Starring: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Tom Atkins, Darlene Love

Directed by: Richard Donner

Written by: Shane Black

Length: 112 minutes

Released: March 6, 1987

The story of LETHAL WEAPON will ring familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a buddy-cop movie: on the day of his fiftieth birthday, exhausted cop Sergeant Roger Murtaugh (Glover) gets teamed up with Sergeant Martin Riggs (Gibson), a narcotics detective who has recently become dangerous and suicidal due to the recent death of his wife. Murtaugh has been tasked to team with him and determine if he’s faking it or not.

Along the way, Murtaugh has been contacted by an old friend, Michael Hunsaker (Atkins), whose daughter has apparently committed suicide. However, an autopsy shows that she was in reality fatally injected with poisoned drugs, indicating the possibility of murder. As Riggs and Murtaugh follow the trail of evidence, and the involvement of Riggs’ former Special Forces team seems almost certain, the two cops must find a way to bridge their differences and bring justice to the Hunsaker family. Can they do it? What do you think?

The “buddy cop” film genre could theoretically be traced all the way back to Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film STRAY DOG, although the sub-genre really got going in the 80’s with 48 HRS, the BEVERLY HILLS COP trilogy and RUNNING SCARED (you know, the one with the classic duo of Gregory Hines and….Billy Crystal). The genre thrived in the 1990’s and beyond, with movies like the RUSH HOUR trilogy, LAST ACTION HERO, MEN IN BLACK and 21/22 JUMP STREET simultaneously poking some amount of fun at the genre’s trappings while also conforming to its beats (Roger Ebert once referred to these types of flicks as “Wunza” movies….”one’s a (blank), one’s a (blank)”)

The appeal of the “two diametrically opposed guys having to work together” is obvious for storytellers: the conflict is up-front, easy to dramatize and is satisfying for audiences, even if the more in-tune members know where these types of movies are going. Nobody really minds a formula, as long as it works. All a screenwriter or director really needs to do (besides really study WHY these movies work) is contribute their own personal stamp on the formula, and it’s possible you could have hit on your hands.

Enter Shane Black.

Although it wasn’t his very first script (that honor goes to SHADOW COMPANY, a movie you most definitely haven’t seen because it was never made), Black started his career hitting the ground running anyway, striking it big with just his second spec-script (essentially, a script not written as a request from a studio) that would become LETHAL WEAPON. After selling it for a quarter of a million in 1986, Black zipped away to Mexico to appear on camera in 1987’s PREDATOR. All the while, production began on LETHAL WEAPON.

The diametric difference between LETHAL WEAPON’s two central characters come from the amount of energy they carry: Murtaugh is wiped, Riggs is wired. From there, the “personal stamp” that Black provided that would set LETHAL WEAPON’s script apart from others of its ilk is its twisted sense of humor. Riggs is a very funny character at its baseline; how else to describe a guy whose plan to rescue a suicidal man from a rooftop is to handcuff himself to him and tell him they’ll jump together? But the pain Riggs carries inside of him comes from a very real place: as a result of intense loss. The fine line the movie’s main dynamic straddles between playing this situation for pathos (one of our first scenes with Riggs alone shows him nearly blowing his brains out, tears streaming down his face) and for laughs (the central “comedic beat” of the LETHAL WEAPON franchise is Riggs doing something insane and Murtaugh just kind of rolling his eyes) is commendable, even kind of gutsy.

It should be noted that the movie’s offbeat sense of humor wasn’t actually entirely the doing of Black. Director Richard Donner (years removed from the SUPERMAN drama; you should check out my podcast’s episode on that little movie for more) found the original script just a tad too dark and asked writer Jeffrey Boam to add some levity to the proceedings. Lesson learned for Black? Let’s hold onto that for now and track it going forward.

The duo of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover was put together fairly quickly after the duo dazzled Donner with a reading; they were both signed to a deal by the spring of 1986. Gary Busey was picked up for the film during a fallow period in his career (in the 80’s, this was unusual for Mr. Busey), having to audition for a role for the first time in years.

To round out the major cast, John Carpenter favorite (and star of HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH) Tom Atkins was cast as Michael Hunsaker, the father of the woman who commits suicide in the film’s ope ing sequence. Finally, long-standing R&B legend Darlene Love was selected to play Trish, Murtaugh’s wife. For whatever reason, the four LETHAL WEAPON movies constitute the vast majority of Love’s filmography. The only other two movies she appeared in as somebody other than herself was in 2019’s HOLIDAY RUSH and in 2020’s THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES 2. So there you go.

As a movie, LETHAL WEAPON holds up about as much as you might expect, although it’s difficult to completely detach it from its most obvious Christmas action movie* competition, DIE HARD, which came out about a year later. That Bruce Willis vehicle has sort of taken that very specific crown and has never really looked back, its status no doubt bolstered by having its first sequel ALSO set during Christmas.

* Look. everybody, I don’t want to re-litigate the most annoying piece of holiday discourse since that one year everyone was obsessed with figuring out whether “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in support of sexual assault or not, but DIE HARD is obviously a Christmas movie. Or it isn’t! Who cares! Eye of the beholder! I’d rather stick a gun in my mouth Riggs-style than ever get into an actual argument with somebody about this.

Essentially, LETHAL WEAPON suffers from not being DIE HARD, maybe the best action movie ever made. Oh, well! It’s still a good time (if edgier than you remember), with Gibson’s high-wire “loose cannon” act playing well against the straight-faced, beleaguered Glover. At the end of the day, it’s about those two, and you never get tired of watching them, the real signifier of success for what essentially amounts to another entry in the buddy cop genre.

And let’s not forget the real reason for the season. The Christmas of it all! Even though Christmas doesn’t really factor into the plot, the trappings of the holidays are everywhere. The damn opening scene (where a topless female jumps out of the window of a high-rise, plummeting to her death) is scored to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock”. One of its most somber “we’re gonna get her back” moments takes place in a living room, with Riggs and Murtaugh framed by a family Christmas tree.

So, does anything hold LETHAL WEAPON back? Well, there’s that guy in the middle of it all.

I’m afraid we have to talk a little bit about Mel Gibson.

Here’s the funny thing about “cancel culture” (a phrase I sorely wish had never entered the cultural lexicon, if only to avoid having to hear people twice my age complain about it, please also see “woke”): who exactly is “cancelled” is eventually up to the individual. For instance, despite having apologized and technically (TECHNICALLY) not having committed a crime, I personally haven’t been able to return to Louis C.K.’s work, despite him being one of my very favorite comedians even as recently as five years ago. Yet, after a brief respite, he’s still out there winning Grammys and selling out shows. He’s cancelled to me, but not for many of ye.

On the other hand, despite wishing he had made better choices, and still sort of waiting for another shoe to drop, I’ve been able to still enjoy John Mulaney’s new material just fine. Not everybody agrees with me on that, deciding the way he’s decided to deal with his addiction has ruined the “harmless man-boy” facade. The facade is really important when you’re a celebrity! Once it’s gone, people don’t always come back, even if you’ve owned up and moved on.

So it goes for Mel Gibson and, boy, lemme tell ya, when I started putting this all together, I knew this would be a delicate conversation. But, I didn’t anticipate his particular….uh, anti-Semitism to become in vogue with so many other celebrities now in 2022. Seeing a certain rapper/mogul/masked man completely melt down has made me reflect quite a bit and really think about how much I want to let Gibson off the hook even now.

The thing is, when people think of “Mel Gibson controversy”, most people remember his 2006 DUI meltdown that led directly to his anti-Semitic outburst, as well as his 2010 leaked voicemail viciously berating his ex-girlfriend by using maybe the one word you really cannot use. But trouble for Gibson started all the way back in 1991 with an interview with Spanish paper El Pais, where he made some, er, colorful statements about homosexuals.

I bring this stuff up not to moralize or condemn (after all, the El Pais interview is over thirty years ago now), but to give context as to why some people aren’t so comfortable enjoying Gibson’s movies anymore, and probably never will again. It’s true that essentially every public transgression in his life can be traced back to alcoholism and he’s admitted as much. But stuff like an A-list star dropping the N-word (yes, it was from a voicemail that we absolutely should never have heard, but the fact that he was willing to say it when he thought nobody was listening is revealing), or a devout and open Catholic going off on Jewish people in a drunken rant (he’s characterized it since as an attempt at “suicide by cop” which….eh) remains startling for many people. Being straight about your addiction can only extend so much grace.

What burns me is that, despite everything, Gibson really did earn his A-list status in his day. It’s not really deniable. Earlier this year, my wife and I watched SIGNS for the first time in maybe twenty years. It’s definitely the first one of M. Night Shyamalan’s major films that showed just the teensiest cracks in his facade, what with the kind of dunderheaded water twist (although I’ve also always hated how Joaquin Phoenix’s character needed to be told the words “swing away” in order to be motivated to pick up a baseball bat and start beating the shit out of an alien….never mind).

But! I was struck at the kind of performance Gibson was giving as Graham Hess, a reverend whose faith has been fundamentally shaken by the gruesome death of his wife (recurring theme for Gibson characters?). It’s a quiet performance, punctuated with awkward, momentary bursts of emotion. It’s mostly all internal, under the surface. It’s damn near perfect.

Compare that with the wild-card energy of LETHAL WEAPON’s Martin Riggs, who is just as comfortable pointing a gun at his own head as he is pointing it at a perp. There couldn’t be two different people than Hess and Riggs, and they both were embodied by the same man.

All of that is what makes him so frustrating to talk about now. You almost wish he was a little more inept as a leading man; it would make it easier to write him off completely. But you can’t! Not entirely. Gibson, at his peak (and even a little after), was undeniably watchable. At least to me.

I also hesitate to hand-wave reconciling his act with his actions away with that “good artists do bad things, get over it” credo, because that’s usually just code for “I’m not giving this particular person up, and I don’t want to be made to feel bad for it”. Again, everybody’s line is different, and it’s fruitless to argue with people about where their personal line ought to be placed. As we’ve observed over the past couple of years, anti-Semitic rants and N-word usage in fits of rage are hard lines for many. Telling those many to get over probably isn’t going to be a long conversation.

Unfortunately, we’ve all had to come to grips with SOME favorite celebrity having their illicit pasts come to light in the For myself, I find it easier to deal with good art from bad people (as I happen to define it; I can’t work off of somebody else’s barometer and neither should you) if the art happens to exist in a time where nobody knew it yet (or at least nobody in the public). It’s not the most perfect test in the world; how does one adjust for changing in social mores (there’s a reason the El Pais wasn’t a deal-breaker in the early 90’s in the way it almost certainly would be now)? What if that previous art has the air of an offender hiding in plain sight (the aforementioned Louis C.K., even….W**** A****)? Your mileage may vary.

Somewhat conveniently for me, LETHAL WEAPON passes that smell test, having comfortably been released in 1987. You may not agree. That’s okay.

At the end of the day, when it comes to celebrities who publicly, spectacularly show their ass, we all have our own guiding principles and dividing lines as to whether not you can ever really enjoy them or not.

It’s a little like how we decide what a Christmas movie is or not.