‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ opened in France this week (it is pretty rare for an American film to open abroad before it does in the US; I don’t what that says about the marketing strategy). I saw a dubbed version rather than a subtitled one, so it is possible that the dialogue sparkled in ways that my French was not able to appreciate. With that caveat, I found the movie disappointing though definitely watchable.
First the good. Robert Downey Jr. And Val Kilmer were a pleasure to watch, and Kilmer really seems to be happier not trying to carry the movie on his own. His Gay Perry has a nice deadpan quality, and he avoids playing up the arch homosexual. What with this and ‘Spartan’ Kilmer may finally have lived down his role in ‘The Saint,’ probably the worst film of the post-Watergate era. Downey is always fun to watch, and here he has a charm that he just about pulls off without looking too goofy. There are lots of nice touches to the movie, involving urination, severed fingers, dogs, coffins and corpses falling into, or onto, dumpsters. They just depart enough from convention to offer a little jerk of surprise and pleasure.
But that’s about it. Michelle Monaghan is given a thankless part that involves smiling stupidly for most of the movie, and Larry Miller disappears after ten minutes. Shane Black seems to have decided that this is a romantic comedy rather than a noir thriller or an action film, and the Downey-Monaghan relationship doesn’t work, not least because they are meant to be similar ages, but transparently are not, no matter how much Downey gives his rumpled Hugh Grant smile. Actually, for all I know it does work as a romantic comedy, but I went to see an offbeat thriller and that turned out not to be playing. But most annoying of all were the repeated arguments between Downey, Monaghan and Kilmer that were meant to pass for buddy movie repartee. I know Black wrote ‘Lethal Weapon I,’ and I don’t know if he was involved in ‘Lethal Weapon II-IV,’ but ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ reproduced the idiotic argumentative repartee between Mel Gibson and Danny Glover that ruined the sequels (and fundamentally changed the Gibson character along the way). Even in French much of this part of the dialogue was stupid.
I’ve dwelt on the negative, but there is a enough here to enjoy, and however convoluted the plot, watching the corpses pile up while Downey wanders around cluelessly is sort of fun.
I’m not a fan in any way, but what is the context for naming “‘The Saint,’ probably the worst film of the post-Watergate era”? There are so many (Heavens Gate, Dances With Wolves, The Batman flick with George Clooney, The Color Purple, AI, Patch Adams, Ghandi, that Coppola film with Robin Williams playing a five-year-old, everything directed by Chris Columbus, Pearl Harbor, Rambo . . . shall I stop?).
“gandhi”, dammit, not “ghandi”. only the descendants of colonial bureaucrats say “ghandi”. but i agree that chris’s hatred of “the saint” (which i remember nikki liking a lot back when we watched it in westwood on opening night) is somewhat irrational and smacks of affectation. i mean, there’s always “magnolia”.
It’s a tough, crowded field, and Jeff has named some worthy candidates (though I liked the first Rambo and all three endings of AI), but the nod has to go to The Saint, primarily on the entirely objective grounds that it got a series I loved as a child so, so badly wrong. The Saint was all about the Roger Moore character; he was never an action hero, just your average aristocratic do-gooder with great hair and endless polite putdowns. To cast Kilmer in that role was beyond horrible. I’d rather have seen a 60-year old Roger Moore play the movie. I guess I see it as a form of sacrilege.
After the Saint ended there was a series called The Persuaders (did it play in the US?) with Moore and Tony Curtis. Moore was the aristocrat, born to wealth, while Curtis grew up on the tough streets of somewhere, became rich, and both fought crime. Wonderful, and no doubt soon to be a major motion picture starring Jude Law and Matt Damon.
I thought it was “Gumby, dammit!”
Heaven’s Gate is underrated.
The problem with The Saint is more that it isn’t really worth rating. But I understand Chris’ reaction against the desecration of sacred childhood texts.
I (foolishly, as if having learned nothing about the distances between my expectations, movie trailers, and actual product) thought this was going to be killer. I love Downey, and think Kilmer is capable of greatness–there are even these weird flashes in the execrable Island of Dr. Moreau, as Kilmer pulls out all stops for a frighteningly good Brando imitation, that make that film worth a gander. That and the little teeny Brando creature.
But Shane Black. Three words: Last Boy Scout. The hype on that film, and then the actual deadening experience of it….
sheesh. And while I’ll agree that the repartee of later Lethal Weapon movies didn’t live up to the first one, that’s kind of like thinking the first Bush was fantastic just ’cause the newer one sucks ass.
I’d never claim (at least not while sober) that the dialogue in Lethal Weapon I was sparkling, but it did build on the premise that Gibson was a suicidal borderline psychopath, so the exchanges between Gibson and Glover had an edge and a crackle to them. By LW II, Gibson’s character had been transformed into a wise-cracking trickster, and not much else. And the action sequence in the desert in the first one was damn good.
Ah, Last Boy Scout, I think we can date Willis’s slide from greatness to that movie.
I think I’ll leave my treatise on the relative merits of Steven Siegal movies for another day.
Gibson is a suicidal borderline psychopath–that’s a “premise”? I thought it was fact.
bruce willis’ “slide from greatness”? i empathize with chris’s pain at hollywood turning a tv show that was about very different kinds of pleasures into a mega-action blockbuster. but then think how the fans of “the dukes of hazzard” must feel: i hear the film version preserves none of the show’s mordant critique of southern masculinity.
that being said, as what it is–a mindless action movie–“the saint” really isn’t that bad. it is a great movie to watch on a plane. which is more than i can say for “sahara”. or “blown away”.
There’s a movie entitled “Blown Away?”
yes.
I don’t want to be dragged into any more discussions of the Saint. Arnab, you keep trying to tarnish me with that brush. I hate Val Kilmer. I think he’s had his brain removed.
Blown Away scores a first for the worst Boston accents ever recorded. I oughta know.
Poor Val Kilmer. Spartan was good. Despite the absence of Rebecca Pidgon.
But remember “Top Secret”? Ahh, those were the days…
I have seen this movie Blown Away–probably because Jeff Bridges appeared in it–but I can recall only a few visuals. That being said, it was a rather obscure reference given the context of the discussion. The Saint, Sahara and Blown Away. Now there’s a triple feature at the New Beverly.
I liked Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Good trashy fun. I can’t imagine seeing it dubbed (did Downey and Kilmer do their own voices en francais?). I walked in with low expectations (my mom took my daughter to see Dreamer and I just couldn’t stomach another Dakota Fanning film–even if it was filmed in my hometown of Frankfort, KY–and it was easier to stick around and watch KKBB than drive away and back again). Still, I truly enjoyed this film. I had forgotten how fun an R-rated movie can be.
Notes:
Heaven’s Gate, if you submit to its leisurely pace, is actually a pretty good movie, full of great moments.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is definitely worth watching for Kilmer and Brando, who apparently weren’t “directed” at all and simply spun out of control. and doesn’t Brando do a song with mini Brando?
Spartan is awful–or was its arch machismo a parody of machismo? so many lines in it made me slap my head in dismay that I was black and blue by the end of it. And I generally like David Mamet.
I think both The Avengers and The Rocky and Bullwinkle movie are worse than The Saint. and let’s not forget Forrest Gump.
I believe The Persuaders is being shown on BBC America.
I, too, haven’t much time when at my computer these days to do the post I’d like to on “sleaze” or trash pictures. Not b-movie action (Van Damme), but the sort of grind-house stuff Tarantino exploits to great effect in Kill Bill, and that I kind of whet my aesthetic teeth on in high school.
We’d watch some foreign or indie or classic film we’d heard was important, then we’d choose a second for our double-feature based on the most lurid title, box art, or plot. E.g., Citizen Kane then Gator Bait. And I don’t mean Troma stuff, fun as that can sometimes be; I mean the ‘straight’ exploitative thrills of some very z-grade films.
And I bring it all up for a couple of reasons here. I too liked Kiss Kiss, despite very low expectations. Partly the merits of the movie, partly shin-high hopes, partly $2 ticket, partly great old movie-house venue. Kilmer is very funny, and as remarked above, has a rich wonderful history with deadpan zing that gets lost in the dross and ego of so much of his other work. And, yes, I mean you, Oliver Stone.
But it struck me how this film kind of wants to be a romantic comedy, yet also play with the most lurid z-movie excesses exploiting not just the bodies of women but the most literalized version of those (i.e., dead) bodies. Now, again, this calls for some context, a longer post–on sleaze and trash as potentially liberating–which I intend to work on elsewhere. What I found irritating was NOT the exploitation per se, but the attempts to cover it up. As an explicit example, one woman’s dead body is exposed from the waist down; there is a medium close-up on the groin, which is how I refer to genitals when making sweet sweet love, as Downey pulls her dress down. That struck me as a prime example of how the film both wants to be a sleazy thriller (like the Jonny Gossamer stories it both idealizes and mocks) and yet comment from far above. So … I guess, in brief, Tarantino gets his ‘updating’ exactly right; he understands and enacts the alternate ethics and aesthetics of the shitty exploitation film. Shane Black is far too Hollywood, too Silver-ed, to be taken seriously as someone ostensibly “unserious” about film. His pretensions to being more than the trash he exploits are irritating, and undercut what is often quite (exploitationally) alluring.
Now, defending my take on sleaze will have to wait. But. I’ve been muttering here and there about Galactica and nothing else of late, so I thought I’d pipe up.