Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Iron Man 3 is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but one of the things I care about most is that it’s the second movie directed by formerly iconic action-comedy writer Shane Black, and the second of those to star Robert Downey, Jr. The first one being among the most underrated Hollywood movies of the 2000s, it was a pretty easy decision to use this excuse to remind you all of its existence.
Before I got shooting my mouth off, I want to make it clear that Lethal Weapon is a perfect version of itself: it is the great buddy-cop movie, and that’s not going to change, ever. And since I, like, just admitted two seconds ago that I’ve never seen The Last Boy Scout, you should take that under consideration. Now, having done all of that ass-covering: I’m pretty sure that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the best movie, with the best script, in writer Shane Black’s career. Maybe that’s not a compliment in your eyes; and it is true, when 2005 rolled around and I’d heard that the onetime hottest hotshot young writer in Hollywood was making his directorial debut, my thought was an unambiguous and instant “ew, no”. 2005 being the height of my “popcorn movies aren’t real cinema” phase, and even Lethal Weapon itself having been reduced in my eyes to the status of fun but tacky trash. The subsequent years have schooled me, hard, in the knowledge that popcorn movies might not be real cinema, but the yawning gulf that separates great popcorn movies from stubbornly mediocre popcorn movies is terrifying and vast, and it is well to pay the proper respect to people who can do it right.
Hence, Shane Black. Who had, by 2005, not been doing it right, or doing anything at all, for damn close to a decade, and given that KKBB was given an mewling little toss-off release – its Cannes debut apparently confusing Warner Bros. into supposing it was an art film, I guess – it’s hard to say that it’s really a popcorn movie by the classic definition. But the way that his semi-triumphant “return” film (following which, he’d duck out of sight again for eight years until Iron Man 3) plays is strictly, exuberantly populist entertainment: it is grand, dumb throwback that makes fun of itself and the exact kind of movies it’s hearkening to at every possible turn, managing to land the tricky feat of being both an effortless critique of a thing and a top-notch exemplar of the same thing; it is the movie, in fact, that the Black-scripted Last Action Hero from 1993 desperately wanted to be and fumbled.
Broadly, KKBB is Raymond Chandler-style L.A. mystery (the film is divided into daily “chapters” named after Chandler stories) – “adapted in part” from Brett Halliday’s 1941 crime novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them – that showcases so many of the tropes of the “L.A. mystery” as established by decades of pulp writers, films noirs, and neo-noirs, it’s quite beyond this reviewer to say with any confidence if the film is an action-thriller with an unusually forward sense of humor, or if it’s a comedy with an unusually high body count. The mere fact that Black is confident enough to avoid stepping into a box either way is pleasure already; there’s a special joy in movies that would rather do their thing than to fit into an executive’s checklist, films that play like the filmmaker’s private little weird headspace made flesh than actual stories that were ever supposed to appeal to anybody else.
God knows, KKBB is every bit a Black movie: the Christmas setting, a hyper-sexed vision of Los Angeles, the self-conscious delight in arch dialogue that feels like nothing a human being would ever say unless they actively conscious of being in a movie. Which, here, they are: the thing that makes KKBB truly special, the thing that sets it above the other Shane Black scripts, is that it’s being narrated by its protagonist, months after the fact, who knows that he’s narrating a movie, not just telling his life story. Obviously, Black didn’t invent this idea – in 2005,