The best genre parodies are so full of affection for their targets that they can’t help but make a superior example of the very thing they aim to satirize. It can be fun to throw tomatoes at a genre’s contrivances and cliches from the outside, but titles such as Young Frankenstein or Down With Love circumvent your ironic detachment by playing with these tropes from inside a story you care about.
This kind of rare pleasure is one of the reasons Shane Black’s crime caper comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has amassed the following it has since it underperformed in theaters back in 2005. Black’s film actually does double satirical duty, lampooning both the world of Raymond Chandler-esque noir and the world of the hyper-masculine, wise-ass buddy cop action movies of the 80’s and 90’s, a subcategory Black helped to inflate to absurd levels as the big gun screenwriter behind films like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout...
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a gift not just to people who know without being told that the chapter headings are all borrowed from Chandler books, but who also know precisely the shot Robert Downey Jr.’s narrator means when he unfavorably compares a moment of clunky exposition to “the shot of the cook in The Hunt for Red October”.
One of the masterstrokes of Black’s screenplay is having its hero be a guy who in any properly run hard-boiled detective story would be the colorful supporting character. Downey’s Harry Lockhart is a jumped up Peter Lorre who has the verbal dexterity to convince himself he’s Bogart. He has earned none of the actual grit of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, but like everyone else in Los Angeles, he cheerfully believes he can fake it using stuff he’s seen in movies. Case in point: The interrogation scene that arrives late in the film and provides Kiss Kiss its biggest laugh.
Scene: Russian Roulette
The private eye intimidating some crook into giving him his way is one of the cornerstone dynamics of the genre. It's in everything from founding texts like The Big Sleep to more modern, revisionist entries like LA Confidential. It's probably Curtis Hanson's LA Noir that flitted through Harry's mind when he lifted the film's tactic of threatening an uncooperative witness with a gun loaded with one bullet. Of course, LA Confidential was itself a deconstructionist take that wasn't endorsing the familiar cop movie cliches, but that would be lost on a dope like Harry, who betrays a strand of blundering Lebowski DNA under his hyper-verbal alertness. So when he and Val Kilmer’s detective are struggling to get a criminal into giving up the location of a damsel they believe to be in distress, Harry empties all but a single bullet from his gun, spins the chamber and promptly blowing the guy’s brains out before he can finish stealing the line “Where is the girl!?” From Russell Crowe’s Bud White.
It’s a beautiful executed shock of dark comedy, both in the set-up with Downey’s ironclad certainty that this is his hero moment and Kilmer’s slow-dawning horror at what he’s witnessing, and in the aftermath with Downey’s Wile-E Coyote confusion that reality failed to follow his blueprints and Kilmer’s gobsmacked disbelief that Downey could pull the trigger with a live round in the gun and somehow be surprised when it fired. The pair have a crackling chemistry, ricocheting off each other’s charisma. Black, it must be said, knows how to direct honest-to-god Movie Stars to great effect. See also: The Nice Guys.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wears its insouciance on its sleeve, but manages the nifty trick of getting the audience involved in its loopy story anyway. The scene showcases the film's knack for maintaining that trickier-than-it-may-appear balance. We linger an extra few beats after Harry’s roulette gambit fails, first to watch Harry be genuinely horrified that he accidentally killed someone, and then for Kilmer’s Perry to remind him that the goon he shot was interrupted in the process of trying to murder the both of them. It’s an entirely sincere beat, a sober chaser to a riotous shot. Such moments ground a story that could otherwise threaten to tip into total Last Action Hero-style spoofery. In a way, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is like an action-comedy twist on the audition scene from Mulholland Dr., taking great pains to lay out its artifice and getting you to invest anyway.
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