Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Shane Black is back! Remember Shane Black? OK, I didn't either, but I've seen his work. He wrote "Lethal Weapon," "The Last Boy Scout," "Last Action Hero" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight," huge, noisy films, all of them, with ludicrous plots and over-the-top action sequences. In fact, "Lethal Weapon," his first produced screenplay, helped define many of the clichés that now permeate most buddy-cop films. So why be excited for Black's return? Because with "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," his directorial debut, he skewers the genre that was once his bread and butter. The film's narrator openly mocks the conventions of action films, and even mocks "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" for using some of them. In addition, the central characters have a rapport that is 10 times funnier than Danny Glover and Mel Gibson ever HOPED theirs was. With "Kiss Kiss," Black takes the action genre back to its roots: the pulpy detective stories once written by Raymond Chandler and made into movies starring Humphrey Bogart. (In fact, each of the film's onscreen chapter titles is also the name of a Chandler story.) Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is the convivial narrator, often so scatterbrained that he stops the film mid-scene to tell us something he forgot to mention earlier. Harry is a small-time thief who, while fleeing cops in New York, stumbles into an acting audition and is cast, lickety-split, as a private detective in an upcoming film.
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