Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Movie rating: 3/10
The last thing I want to do on Christmas Day is speak ill of anyone. But the first rule of art criticism is to be honest, and especially as a purported “Christmas movie”, this a special case.
Watching a movie on Christmas Eve is a singular honour for a film in my household. Most years we’ve stuck with It’s a Wonderful Life, one of my all-time favourite movies. Occasionally I’ll switch things up with Die Hard or Die Hard 2. But in recent years I’ve experimented with movies I’ve never seen before, under the proviso that the film must be a “Christmas movie”. Being strongly in favour of the view that Die Hard is a Christmas movie, other action movies that happened to be set at Christmas were fair game this year. When my brother suggested we watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it seemed like a fine choice. Writer-director Shane Black sets all his movies at Christmas. I’d always heard good things about this and had been meaning to watch it for ages. It appeared we had a surefire winner. Sadly, things didn’t work out that way.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an homage to hardboiled film noir with a more comedic, self-aware tone. Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is a burglar who gets mistaken for an actor when he barges into a screen test after a botched robbery. He ends up in Los Angeles trailing private investigator “Gay” Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer) to research his role and crosses paths with former high school crush Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), now a struggling actress. Soon Harry finds himself getting involved in a complex murder plot.
For me this was one of those movies where you end up checking your watch and just waiting for it to be over. The plot was so complicated I barely had any idea what was going on. At a certain point I stopped caring what I was watching and everything on the screen just washed over me. There would still be occasional funny moments. Downey and Kilmer have a nice dynamic, and Monaghan is easy on the eyes. The climax has some cool action. But it felt like too little, too late.
Aside from the overly busy and confusing plot, what grates most about this film is its sense of smug self-satisfaction, where Black appears to think he’s more clever than he is. There are a lot of attempts at witty Tarantino-esque dialogue on minutiae like the proper use of adverbs. Sometimes these lines are funny, but most of the time they fall flat. It left me feeling like Black might be the most overrated screenwriter in Hollywood. Yes, Lethal Weapon is a classic action flick that defined the buddy cop genre. But much of what I’ve seen from him has been middling at best. This is also one of those Hollywood movies that has a heavy focus on Los Angeles and the film industry, which often winds up feeling insular and self-indulgent.
The acting is fine, but Downey’s performance is a good example of the movie’s problems. Downey was freshly sober when this film was made, but still in the early stages of re-establishing his reputation. Iron Man, where he perfected his persona of the charismatic smartass with a heart of gold and laid the foundations for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was a few years away. His performance in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang feels like a dry run for Tony Stark, yet the effect is far less appealing due in part to the movie he’s in. Downey, like the film itself, can sometimes be witty as Harry, but more often crosses the line into smarmy and irritating. A minor but persistent annoyance is how often the other characters say Harry’s name.
Maybe if you’re a fan of hardboiled fiction you’ll get more out of this movie than I did. Still, I’m struggling to understand why contemporary critics rated it so highly. There are certain films like The French Connection that have been imitated so much, when a new viewer finally sees it they might wonder what the big deal is. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has a lot of meta humour and self-awareness, but even in 2005 this wasn’t new. The ’90s were full of movies with ironic humour, self-aware narrators, and pop culture references, from Pulp Fiction to Fight Club. Downey’s performance aside, which felt more fresh to audiences pre-MCU, I don’t see what this movie offered that was particularly different or innovative even for its time.
Finally, let’s address the Die Hard question: Is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a Christmas movie? The film has found itself on lists of the best Christmas movies, which is another reason we decided to roll the dice on it this Christmas Eve. Early on, I heard a Christmas song and Harry was attending a Christmas party, and proclaimed this made it enough of a Christmas movie for me. Sadly, I spoke too soon. The Christmas elements are incidental, and quickly fade into the background to the point where they might as well not be there at all.
Compare Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to Die Hard and the latter evokes Christmas far better. The entire reason for John McClane’s presence is an office Christmas party at his wife’s workplace. Die Hard starts and ending with incongruously chipper holiday songs. You have the “Ho ho ho, now I have a machine gun” scene. The story is a simple but compelling hero-saves-the-day-plot that ends on a triumphant note and touches on themes of family, friendship, and a lone saviour.
Or look at another Shane Black film, Lethal Weapon, where the Christmas setting works because it underscores the loneliness of Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and makes it more meaningful when he becomes a friend of new partner Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and his family. Nothing about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang screams Christmas in the same way. In that sense it’s more like Black’s Iron Man 3, where not setting it at Christmas would have almost zero impact. The Yuletide elements present are so weak and irrelevant to the plot that despite its setting, I must emphatically declare that no, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is not a Christmas movie.
Watching a bad movie sucks (“so-bad-it’s-good” flicks aside), especially when you’ve heard it’s a good movie. Watching a bad movie on Christmas Eve—one you’ve been told is not just a good movie, but a good “Christmas movie”—only compounds that disappointment. The few enjoyable elements aren’t enough to save this one and I found watching this film more or less a waste of time. Skip it.