The Fractured Mirror 2.0 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Robert Downey Jr. was born into the movie business. Downey Jr. is a creature of the industry who has been making movies almost as long as he’s been alive.
Downey Jr. shares a name, a bloodline and a complicated legacy with his legendary father, one of the most important experimental filmmakers in the history of American film thanks to seminal masterpieces like Purtney Swope. Downey Jr. was still a small child when he started popping up in his father’s movies like 1970’s Pound and 1972’s Greaser Palace.
As he evolved into a teen star and then a troubled young thespian as undeniably talented as he was famously self-destructive, Downey Jr. continued to work with his father on movies about movies, including the 1989 porn comedy Rented Lips and 1997’s Hugo Pool. Given Downey Jr’s deep roots in cinema and show-business (his mother was an actress who appeared in some of her husband’s films), it’s not surprising that Downey Jr.’s filmography is littered with movies about movies.
Both of Downey Jr’s Academy Awards nominations are for playing not just actors but outsized titans of the cinematic arts, one real, one most assuredly fictional. Downey Jr. pulled off the difficult-to-impossible feat of being a Charlie Chaplin just about everyone loved, even if they didn’t quite love the film his revered performance was anchoring in 1993’s Chaplin. In 2009, meanwhile, a post-comeback Downey was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for playing a demented Uber-thespian in Tropic Thunder so pathologically obsessed with his craft and realism that he undergoes skin-darkening surgery to play a black man.
Downey Jr. did not receive an Oscar nomination for playing a fake actor and bogus detective in Shane Black’s 2005 directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but it has an importance in Downey Jr’s career disproportionate to its modest box-office tally.
Even after getting sober, Downey Jr. had a hard time getting insured for roles and found himself stuck in supporting parts, sometimes in quality motion pictures like former Fractured Mirror entry Bowfinger and sometimes in garbage like Gothika.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang gave Downey Jr. a juicy lead role worthy of his incredible gifts. In a terrific comeback turn, Downey Jr. plays Harry Lockhart, a kid magician from the Midwest who grew up to be an East Coast criminal specializing in theft.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang opens in the 1970s with a magic trick involving our sarcastic anti-hero as a pint-sized sleight of hand master because, at its best, cinema is both magic and a magic trick of sorts, the kind the great director-magician George Melies helped perfect back in the days of silent film.
In the hands of a writer like Lethal Weapon/Monster Squad scribe Black and an actor like Downey Jr., whose gift for dramatizing other people’s words is eclipsed only by his genius for improvising dialogue of his own, screen banter becomes a form of magic as well.
We then jump ahead to the uncertain present. Harry, a thief with a heart of gold and an Olympian-level gift of gab stumbles into the glamorously scuzzy world of Hollywood and film when he flees a toy store robbery gone wrong, ends up auditioning for film producer Dabney Shaw (the great Larry Miller) and accidentally gives an Oscar-worthy method performance, complete with inspired off-book improvisation, due to the convenient similarities between the overwritten nonsense in the script and the real-life trauma he has just barely survived.
Harry is sent to Los Angeles to learn how to convincingly pretend to be a detective with the help of "Gay" Perry van Shrike (a hilarious Val Kilmer, in a wonderful performance that should have done much more for his career), a real-life shamus with a lucrative sideline teaching actors how to convincingly play sleuths. Gay Perry is a walking contradiction. On one hand, it’s a terrific comeback role for the perfectly cast Kilmer that presents a gay man as a sympathetic, well-written, fleshed-out human being who couldn’t be less of a cheap, flamboyant caricature. At the same time, Perry’s sexuality is referenced in nearly every scene he appears in and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang can’t help but dip a toe into the murky, gross waters of gay panic humor every once in a while.
Also, it seems curious that as recently as sixteen years ago, an out gay man living and working in the Los Angeles area would be enough of a novelty that characters would feel the need to comment on it constantly, the way they do here.
Harry and Perry find themselves immersed in a shadowy world of incest and murder, dead bodies and desperate, wannabe show-business players when Harry reconnects with Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), an aspiring actress he has a long, yearning personal history with that dates all the way back to his youth in the Midwest.
Downey Jr. and Monaghan have an explosive bond rooted partially in potent sexual chemistry, partially in their shared love of words, particularly the ones found in the third-rate detective series they both revere, and partially in an underlying sense of sadness and disappointment they share. Monaghan is wonderfully verbal and sly even if it’s impossible to accept that her character and Downey Jr.’s are roughly the same age and went to high school together when Downey Jr. is over a decade older than Monaghan in real life.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a seedy neo-noir that takes place in the underbelly of the entertainment industry around Christmastime, Black’s favorite time of year. There are echoes of Chinatown, particularly in a running gag involving Harry’s finger getting violently, forcibly removed and a subplot involving a powerful, sinister, actor patriarch played by Corbin Bernsen, as well as Night Moves and The Long Goodbye. But like a good thief Black alchemizes all of his influences into something that feels unmistakably, distinctively his own.
In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Downey Jr. is so sharp, and such a blessed wiseass that he exists in two realities: the film’s and our own, and can segue between the two at any point. He’s a smartass hipster God, an unreliable narrator toying with the conventions of film, even the visual language of film, as he spins this crackling yarn sideways and upside down and is continually commenting on the action, and the filmmaking, and the storytelling, as it happens.
Downey Jr. doesn’t just narrate the film; he makes us his confidantes and his co-conspirators as well as his audience. Downey Jr. narrates the film in a way that continually calls attention to its artifice. He is forever breaking the fourth wall and spends so much time talking to the audience, sometimes while directly facing the camera, that we become an unseen but crucial character.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang never stops reminding us that it’s a movie, and that it knows that we know that it’s a movie. In that respect, Harry is a singular, unforgettable combination of hard-boiled tough guy and gleeful wisenheimer, half Humphrey Bogart, half Bugs Bunny, all Robert Downey Jr.
It would be unfair to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to call it a test run for Downey Jr. as Iron Man, even if Downey Jr. and Black would re-team fortuitously for 2013’s Iron Man 3, the final and best entry in the series and one of the finest, most distinctive films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but, like Tony Stark, Harry embodies a very Robert Downey Jr. combination of glib smartassery and surprising emotional depth.
Black and Downey Jr.’s much-loved cult comeback action-comedy didn’t just re-establish that its charismatic lead was a great actor; it also illustrated that he was a great movie star as well. Though Kiss Kiss Bang Bang only did okay at the box-office it nevertheless paved the way for Downey Jr. to assume bigger roles in larger movies, including one of the biggest movies of all time in Avengers: Endgame.
That this transcendently silly movie has emotional stakes and depth at all is almost entirely attributable to Downey Jr’s pitch-perfect performance. This is the kind of snappy Neo-Noir where people get murdered and nobody bats an eye but the anguish Downey Jr. conveys after killing someone lends a genuine element of intense, real emotion to a delightful movie-movie that enjoys sadistically toying with the audience’s expectations.
In 2005, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang served notice to Hollywood that not only were reformed bad boys Downey Jr. and Black back and open for business, but also that they were operating at the very apex of their extraordinary, overlapping ability.
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