Is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a Christmas Movie? The Case for It

Is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a Christmas movie? The case for it

The standard holiday picture glows. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang glows in a different way: neon, headlights, a mansion lit up for a party where nobody is behaving. Is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a Christmas movie by the usual definition? Not quite, since nobody learns the true meaning of anything while carols play. By the more useful definition it is, because the holiday is the backdrop of the story and its emotional engine. A man starts the film as a petty thief and finishes it with a life he can recognize.

The film belongs to the outliers that sit just beneath the haloed classics, the ones that stretch the idea of a holiday movie while keeping its sentiment. Shane Black wrote and directed it, and he has built much of his career on this sort of Christmas-set action story. The result is raunchy, violent and funny, and it feels warmer than its rating suggests.

The film is also a clever piece of misdirection. Los Angeles at Christmas is a place where everybody is performing, and the story uses that fact. Studio parties, auditions, private detectives hired to coach an actor: the holiday season is one more costume in a city full of them.

The opening party

The first images are startling. The last time Robert Downey Jr. floated through a Los Angeles Christmas party on screen was nearly two decades earlier in Less Than Zero, the adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, and the mansion here looks close enough to that film’s hedonistic house to read as a deliberate echo. Downey is a different man now. He looks tired and out of place, and he narrates in a noir voice-over about how last Christmas changed everything. The city, he says, is a place where a girl named Jill spells it with a Y and an E, and you are welcome to the party.

Harry, Perry and Harmony

Downey plays Harry Lockhart, a small-time thief from the East Coast. A robbery at Christmastime goes wrong, he is shot in the arm and he stumbles into an audition that feels so close to his real situation that it lands him a screen test. Soon he is flown to Los Angeles for a screen test, and the production company has assigned him a consultant, a private detective who goes by Gay Perry (Val Kilmer). Perry’s name is a running joke, and the film answers the obvious question at once. He is a real private investigator, and the producers hope he will teach Harry how a detective behaves.

At the party Harry meets Harmony (Michelle Monaghan), a small-town girl with big-city dreams who grew up on pulp novels about a detective named Johnny Gossamer. The two knew each other as kids. Things go well, then badly, and then the night takes a turn. While tailing a car with Perry, Harry watches it plunge into a lake. Perry pulls a girl out of the sinking vehicle, but she is already dead, and two masked men appear. Perry realizes he has been hired as a witness to a murder.

The mystery

The mystery keeps tightening. Police tell Harry that Harmony has killed herself, and hours later she appears on his doorstep. It was her sister who died, found with Harmony’s ID. Harmony believes Harry is a real detective and that her sister was murdered, so she asks him to find the killer. He reluctantly agrees. Whether the dead woman in the lake is connected to that case is the question that drives the rest of the film, and the pleasure lies in watching the connections arrive.

The noir under the tinsel

Black structures the story like a detective novel. The chapters carry the titles of Raymond Chandler books, and Harry narrates the way a Chandler hero would, with similes that are funnier than they should be. The narration is also unreliable in a comic way. Harry stops the story to apologize, to correct himself and to address the audience directly, which makes the film feel like a conversation with a man who is aware that the plot is a mess and wants to charm his way past it.

That voice is what keeps the holiday setting from turning into wallpaper. Christmas in this film is a kind of pressure. People are lonely, desperate and a little drunk, and the season supplies reasons for strangers to end up in the same room. Harry’s opening voice-over presents a man who is out of place at the party. By the end, he has reclaimed some semblance of a normal life.

It helps that the leads are in such good form. Downey plays Harry as a man who talks fast to keep from thinking, Kilmer turns Perry into the dry center of the film, and Monaghan gives Harmony enough heart that the audience cares what happens to her. The three of them make the case that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang earns its holiday place. A Christmas movie does not have to be gentle, and this one proves it.

What makes Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a holiday film

The seasonal case rests on a handful of details.

• It is set in Los Angeles at Christmas, and the parties, lights and decorations stay in the frame from the first scene.
• Harry’s arc ends with a fresh start: he solves a murder mystery, saves several lives and gets back a version of an ordinary life.
• Black splits the film into chapters named after Raymond Chandler’s books, so the holiday story is also an affectionate noir.
• The script is loosely based on Brett Halliday’s 1941 novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang review: why it still holds up

Black, who wrote Lethal Weapon and co-wrote The Monster Squad, made his directing debut with this film. The writing is quick, crude and consistently clever. Harry’s voice-over comments on the genre as it unfolds, and the dialogue gets laughs from the contrast between the film’s noir pose and the idiots who populate it. There are severed appendages, tense shootouts and a flying coffin, and none of it undermines the picture. It is one of those films where everything works: the performances, the photography, the production design and, above all, the script.

It also matters for what came next. Downey described it as his calling card to Iron Man, after a run of years in which his career had ricocheted from highs to lows. Black was eventually brought back to co-write and direct Iron Man 3 with him. The film did not make much money in theaters, but it changed how people thought about both men, and the picture has been a cult favorite ever since.

The verdict on the question is simple. Is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a Christmas movie? If a story that begins with a botched holiday robbery and ends with a man reclaiming his life qualifies, it does. Anyone planning a holiday watch list that already has It’s a Wonderful Life on it should add this film to the other column, the one for viewers who want mistletoe and murder in the same evening.

Sources

• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Wikipedia — Checked against: director, cast, setting and release year.