Hollywood payback

Reviewed - Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: Back in the 1980s, Shane Black took the fast lane from college to Hollywood, securing famously fat paychecks for Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. Returning to movies after a long, self-imposed exile but still bitter after all these years, Black turns director and lets off steam with a caustic, unremittingly cynical satire on the film industry, the manufacture of genre movies, and the vacuity and phoniness of Los Angeles life.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang opens in the run-up to Christmas, as New York petty thief Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr) escapes from a botched toy shop robbery into a movie audition where his undisguised desperation causes the producers to assume he is a Method actor. Sent to LA for a screen test as a detective, Harry picks up tips from Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer), a suave, openly gay private eye who warns him that he's being used, that the studio is threatening to cast him as a ruse to get their ideal choice, Colin Farrell, to knock a few million off his exorbitant salary to play the same role.

At a particularly eventful party in the Hollywood Hills, Harry just happens to meet a crush from his teen past, Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), an aspirant actress who shares his admiration for Jonny Gossamer, a fictional author of pulp fiction such as You'll Never Die in This Town Again.

There are explicit nods to Raymond Chandler novels as the movie sets in motion a convoluted neo-noir mystery yarn. That, however, exists essentially as a device to string together a succession of sharp in-jokes and movie references - beginning with a retro credits sequence in the style of Saul Bass - in a movie that is blatantly and amusingly self-referential.

The casting of Downey Jr and Kilmer is inspired. They spark off each other with gusto in this energetic and entertaining screwball comedy-thriller that proves much more fun than anything Black wrote for other directors in the past.