#FILMFRIDAYS: KISS KISS BANG BANG.

Year: 2005.

Dir: Shane Black.

I saw The Hit-man’s Bodyguard last week and although I found the chemistry between Samuel L. Jackson and dynamic and entertaining, the hackneyed writing and shoddy execution of just about everything else made the film easily forgettable and a missed opportunity for the stars’ performances. The trick to making buddy (cop) films is not in elevating the dynamism of the leads but in blending it with an equally engrossing context or story and very few do it as good as Shane Black.

Black revolutionized and redefined the buddy cop genre with his screenplay of the 1987 classic, Lethal Weapon.(“I am getting to old for this”).Since then, Black’s drive for non-conventionality has led to an ever evolving formula made by combining and subverting other traditional Hollywood tropes and genres. This is not more refined than in his brilliant directorial debut, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

This black comedy crime film which is loosely adapted from Brett Holiday’s “Bodies Are Where You Find Them”, stars a pre-ironman Robert Downey Jr. as a pretty crook impersonating as an actor and post-batman Val Kilmer as a private investigator. Things turn for the worse when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and get themselves entangled in a classic Hollywood murder mystery.

The typical elements of “Shane-Black-ism”; A compelling co-valence between the two leads, clever deadpan dialogue laced with tongue-in-cheek humor and splashes of bloody ultra-violence are the highlights of this comeback vehicle driven straight at the classic crime fiction genre with the intent to crash. And trust me, the lights never dim once. So Enjoy!