Film Review	Twice Told Tales: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Derailed by M. Faust

Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

A classicist will tell you that there are only a handful of stories, and that every new tale is merely a variant of one of those. Even if your criteria aren’t quite so stringent, though, it’s hard to dispute that there are certain stories that get reused over and over again. What matters is the panache each new teller brings to them.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang at first seems like a parody of Los Angeles detective stories. That’s certainly what you would expect from the title, which in the future is going to make the DVD hard to find at the likes of Amazon.com: a search is likely to find you a volume of Pauline Kael’s film reviews, Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill, the Italian psychedelic classic Kiss Me Kill Me, Roger Corman’s Kiss Me a Killer, Jesus Franco’s Kiss Me Killer or Kiss and Kill, Andy Milligan’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (inspiration for the Cure album of the same title)… (Ed. note: this is all we saw fit to include from a long list that indicates that our reviewer spends too much time researching when he should be writing.)

Our hero is Harry (Robert Downey Jr.), a petty New York thief who is flown to Los Angeles to audition for a movie role as part of a chain of events that are too preposterous to recount. To get background information for his character, he is assigned to hang around with hard-boiled private eye Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer), nicknamed “Gay Perry” for reasons other than the reference to France’s biggest city.

Harry narrates the story with a pronounced desire to deflating the clichés of the genre, freezing or rewinding the film when he gets ahead of himself and generally poking fun at the script’s endless Raymond Chandlerisms (though it is left to us to recognize that the chapter titles are taken from Chandler novels).

We soon realize that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is not so much parodying the detective genre clichés as replaying them with a genial frosting of mockery. I would suspect that the director might even be mocking the script he was working from were they not both the work of Shane Black, making his debut as a director after two decades as one of Hollywood’s best-paid writers, beginning with the Lethal Weapon movies. Black more openly parodied this kind of stuff in The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight, movies I’m willing to bet you can barely recall even if you’ve seen them.

The mystery that Harry and Perry investigate is either ridiculously complicated (a la the 1946 Howard Hawks Chandler adaptation The Big Sleep, in which even the writers admitted that they didn’t know who was responsible for one of the murders) or so indifferently laid out that it merely seems complicated. The latter is quite possible: whatever Black’s intentions going in, his film is wholly hijacked by the actors, a crime to which he seems to have acquiesced. The dialogue flies with a speed (not to mention quantity) that hasn’t been heard since the 1930s; I don’t know how many choice lines I missed under the laughter, but it would be worth seeing the film again for them.

Eschewing gay stereotypes, Kilmer, who started out as a comic actor before making the Keanu Reeves mistake of Going Serious, is a fine foil for Downey, whose readings are so endlessly novel that one suspects he gave the film’s editors myriad choices to work with. They’re matched by Michelle Monaghan, who as the aspiring actress on the wrong side of the hill deftly avoids the usual clichés of detective story heroines. (Credit Black at the very least for not writing her as a femme fatale.) That Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is smart fun is proved by the fact that Hollywood seems to have no faith in it: it’s playing locally at only one venue, a somewhat out of the way one at that. It’s worth the gas.

***

Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen in Derailed

“The author intrigues the reader by twisting the narrative so you never know what to expect,” says a character at the beginning of Derailed, the first film from former Miramax honchos Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s new company. He’s supposed to be writing a book report, but he’s rather obviously announcing the intentions of this film. Unfortunately, he’s only half right: I pretty much knew what to expect at every twist of the story in this joylessly regurgitated tale of passion and revenge.

Charles Schine (Clive Owen) is an overworked Chicago advertising director, stuck in his job because he and his wife need the money for their ailing daughter’s rising medical costs. Marital infidelity is against his nature, but he is tempted by Lucinda Harris (Jennifer Aniston), another married commuter he meets on the morning train.

Their decision to indulge in a little slap and tickle goes wrong when their hotel room is invaded by a sadistic thug who beats Charles unconscious and rapes Lucinda. Worse, he takes advantage of the fact that neither of them will go to the police to blackmail Charles, demanding more and more money out of the savings he has put aside for his daughter’s medical fund.

Derailed is a secondhand story that wants you to think it’s inventing fresh twists. I won’t give away the story’s major surprise, other than to note that I saw it coming a mile away (and I’m not usually too swift about such things). For this story to have had any impact, it should have moved the revelation to no more than the midway part of the film rather than near the end.

Owen is fine as a middle-class guy pushed to the breaking point, while French star Vincent Cassel is suitably vile as the villain of the piece. (He even has a Satanic little beard, just in case you were thinking of giving him the benefit of the doubt.) The weak link is Aniston, implausibly cast as a femme fatale who could lure a man away from his wife and family. Those fans the actress may retain after enough tabloid publicity in the past year to make Michael Jackson seem like J. D. Salinger (just this morning I was attacked in the supermarket checkout lane by a magazine headline screaming “Brad and Jen Talk!”) should be warned that hers is really only a supporting part, albeit one inappropriately expanded to increase her screentime.

If Derailed is the kind of movie that the Weinsteins left Disney to make, it only offers further proof that Miramax’s success was due to smart acquisitions rather than production. Unlike Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, this is playing at a theater near you no matter where you are. Save your gas money.