This Business Can Kill You: KISS KISS BANG BANG

Once upon a time I stumbled into a film that I had never seen a trailer for. It was Geena Davis as a housewife with amnesia, remembering bit by bit that she was a hitman and then kicked ass for the rest of the movie. It was Long Kiss Goodnight and one of my favorite movies of the year, and unfoturtanely for Writer Shane Black, I was one of the only ones who saw it. That's right, the largest spec script sale in the history of hollywood, 3 million dollars, flopped. And Shane Black was personan non gratis is la la land. Or so the story goes. It's amazing that the man who created the Lethal Weapon franchise had to take work as the Cafe Manager in As Good As it Gets in the long dry spell. But then he did what got him into the business in the first place, wrote a great script. And he got them to let him produce it.

KISS KISS BANG BANG is great fun, flick. Robert Downey Jr., in his latest (3rd?) career renaissance, plays a petty criminal who accidentally walks into an audition and gets whisked off to LA. There he is teamed up Val Kilmer, a P.I. who must give him on the job 'cop' training and goes by the catchy moniker of Gay Perry. He also runs into his first love, Harmony, played by fresh face Michelle Monaghan (NORTH COUNTRY) who I think we are going to see much from in the future (she is slated to appear in MI:3). The characters are tight and dialogue is funny and the directing, is perfect! K2B2 features one of the classic devices of literature, a suspect narrator, as Downey often must revise his story, jump back in flashback to explain something he missed or simply lie.... it's brilliant in the context of the film noir story, where the connections between the characters become deeper than originally thought. ANd of course, it;s funny.

I have to admit that it took about 10 minutes for the movie to find its stride because it jumps around so much right at the beginning, but once it found it, it danced straight on to the end. I have rarely had this much fun in the movie and I hope this is the first of many such films from writer/now-director Shane Black.

K2B2 is recommended to fans of buddy action film, people who like parodies of buddy action films, people who to support the latest bid for Robert Downey Jr's sobriety, and any one who wants to have a good time. RIck's Rating: A-