Kissing the action movie goodbye

It takes one to know one, the saying goes, and one natural extension of that idea is that internal criticism is often sharper than lambasting originating from the outside. And, sure, sometimes this is true: With his mid 90s smash, Scream Wes Craven both deconstructed and reinvented the horror movie genre he helped create. With Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood brought moral seriousness to the gritty, violent Westerns he helped popularize. Other times it's less successful, the most recent example being former First Things editor Damon Linker's unconvincing, overlong diatribe about Catholic scribe Richard John Neuhaus. Bruce Willis' attempts to skewer his own persona in The Kid and the Nine Yards films were pretty miserable as well. Same goes for De Niro’s comedic turns. I'm not even going to get into the David Brock/David Horowitz issues, nor will I touch Fukuyama. Point being, sometimes it works, but just because someone had a hand in creating something doesn't by default mean they're the ones to tear it down.

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, the little-seen action send up from writer/director Shane Black, falls somewhere in the middle. Black knows the buddy action comedy better than anyone. As a kid in his early 20s, he helped invent the genre with his Lethal Weapon screenplays as well as scripts for The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Last Boy Scout. But that doesn't seem to help him as much as one might hope. Sure, the film has a smirky, meta-sheen to it, but it plays like an elementary school Charlie Kaufman's early attempts at self-aware screenwriting. Mostly Black just follows the clichés he thinks he's skewering, forgetting to twist them or satirize them in the way the first act suggests and letting them simply play out like they would in any of the other bloody, glitzy buddy movies about cops, cars, and guns that have become a multiplex staple over the last 20 years. It's a movie about how action movies are silly and derivative that's, well, silly and derivative.

Robert Downey Jr.'s voice-over, which talks to the audience with full awareness that it's explaining a movie—even rewinding and saying things like, "I'm a bad narrator, I forgot to show you _______," is fun at first, but Black doesn't have the warped genius needed to make it really work. Instead of sending Downey's V.O. in for the kill and really lampooning the genre--cynically pointing out all of its crutches and absurdities--he just makes the narration kind of dopey. Worse, he seems to forget that the voice over exists about a third of the way through the film, only bringing it back as an easy way to wrap things up at the end. Where's Joss Whedon when you need him?

No, Black's talent isn't creative inversion of tropes, it's taking genre clichés to their ludicrous extreme. This time he stabs the guy with an icepick from behind his eye! Inside out style! Cool! Etc. So, of course, there's plenty of wanton, brutal—but inventive!—violence. Problematically, the casual attitude toward bloodletting, always a staple of Black's movies, doesn't mesh well with its cutesy comic undertones. It's one thing for two ornery cops to put holes in bad guys while bickering, but when your hero is supposed to be sweet, lovable and kind of out of his element, it's jarring to see him slaughter so carelessly.

Black's other talent—his ability to come up with outrageous-yet-lyrical dialog, full of the sort of metaphor and aphorism only used by kooky film characters—is also readily apparent. And sure, it works, but I liked Inside Man's take better. Denzel utters the obligatory overly clever line, "Last time I had my johnson pulled like that it cost me five dollars," and Lee lets the camera sit for a minute, giving it time to sink in—and then Willem Dafoe, the grumbling tactical realist, looks confused and says… "Five dollars?" Nobody actually talks that way, and though Spike Lee couldn't avoid including the bit, he could call attention to the fact that such colloquialisms are actually really weird in normal conversation. Black, on the other hand, sprinkles his dialog with any number of such lines but isn't smart enough to do anything with them.

Black has been hinting at his dissatisfaction with the genre rules he helped enshrine since The Last Boy Scout. That film ended with Bruce Willis telling Damon Wayans something to the effect of “This is the 90s. You can’t just shoot a guy anymore. If you hit him with a surfboard, you have say ‘surf’s up.’” Later, he did some rewrite work on an arguably better (though thoroughly overlooked and underappreciated) spoof of the shoot-em-up genre, Last Action Hero. But it seems as if he can’t quite escape the over-the-top, frenetic, mindlessly violent, goofball home he’s built: The best moments in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang come not from making fun of action movie standbys, but in playing them to the hilt as only Shane Black can.