Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

I don’t know, how do you not love a movie that includes lines like this one, about women in Los Angeles:

I swear to God, it’s like somebody took America by the East Coast, and shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.

And that’s what Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is like: Relentlessly clever dialogue, witty screenplay, extremely self-aware without crossing the line into being eye-glazing about it.

Essentially an update of a second-tier LA-based noir film, the film moves so quickly and is so funny that many audiences may not catch that they’re watching a film that could have once starred Alan Ladd or Humphrey Bogart. There’s the beaten-to-a-pulp detective in over his head, the rich movers and shakers who can crush him at will, the dream girl who’s alternately sexually available and loathes him, dead bodies that get moved around, seemingly on their own and lots more standard bits.

Toss in Robert Downey, Jr. doing his best work in years, Val Kilmer, funny again for the first time in decades and the new-to-me-but-ought-to-be-a-star Michelle Monaghan, and you’ve got a solid, solid cast capable of making the clever script pop. Heck, there’s even some footage from a truly awful 1980s Corbin Bernsen action movie, which isn’t something you see every day.

It’s hard to figure how this got overlooked in theaters, but no fans of buddy movies (the film is written and directed by the creator of the first — and vastly superior to the sequels — Lethal Weapon movie), Downey or Kilmer should miss this.

Sensationally great fun.

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