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Based in part on mystery novelist Brett Halliday’s Bodies Are Where You Find Them, Black’s film is equal parts dissection of the private eye genre and the Los Angeles bourgoise; although there are more wholes to fill in. Harry Lockhart (Downey), a low-level thief stumbles into a casting call after his partner is shot during a botched robbery and finds himself a part in a Hollywood movie. Now hobnobbing amongst the L.A. elite, Harry will meet two people who will join him in a real-life murder mystery. “Gay” Perry Van Shrike (Val Kilmer) is a real P.I. and consultant to the movie industry and Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan) is a wannabe actress whom Harry actually met years ago when they were childhood friends in Indiana.

On a routine stakeout where Perry promises to show Harry the boring aspects to being a professional snoop, a car in the lake leads to a body in the trunk and Harry not astute to realize never to ask for help from men in ski masks. The body is actually the daughter of former actor and current philanthropist, Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen), a fact involving an inheritance that Harry the Narrator told us earlier is something we should pay attention to; a scene in movies that he hates like “the shots of the cook in The Hunt for Red October.” As Perry would rather not be involved, Harry can’t help but get to the bottom of it with apparent suicides and bodies showing up all around him. Plus, it may be his in with the dream girl who’s had a lifelong fixation on the pulpy detective stories they now seem to be emulating.

All is fine within the framework in spurts. Sometimes it’s pointing out its own clichés (especially the overburdening narrator), sometimes it’s just a banter-fest between the three leads. It’s mystery is complicated enough for any Raymond Chandler wannabe, but mostly in the details and not in their revelations which isn’t much different than say Riggs & Murtaugh putting the pieces together for a big action finale. Black, in his directorial debut, doesn’t concentrate on suspense and rather lets his own words drive the story. It all leads to a mish-mash of tone that keeps the audience off-base as to which highway we should be taking.

Kilmer hasn’t had this much with a role in years; Black’s dialogue leading way to the kind of cynical know-it-all that he once specialized in. The film is at its best with him trying to show Downey the ropes and calling him on the mistakes that just leads to more complications. Kilmer and Downey fall into their old routines like clockwork and it drives the movie when it paints itself into other routines to fall back on. Michelle Monaghan is sexy as the small town girl looking for a break – but the character is alternately the smartest person in the room and nothing more than a glamorized groupie.

Black has been genre-skewing all the way back to the Lethal Weapon franchise and only became more prevalent with The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Kiss Kiss works on that level but is only half as clever as it thinks it is and finds itself settling into those patterns after a first half calling way too much attention to itself. By the time it gets into the darkest implications of P.I. noir and begins moralizing at the very end, it’s hard to take seriously and is wildly out of place with the lark we were being presented with. As a director, Black proves to still be just another snarky writer whose cleverness remains on the page and not behind the camera. He winds up sabotaging his own material when another director’s perspective could have brought some extra flash and more of an attitude that would have successfully meshed parody with the hallucinatory underbelly of pulp fiction. In other words – Hollywood.

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originally posted: 10/21/05 14:35:39
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