Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Amazon’s deal of the day (for June 18th) is pretty good – the Toy Story trilogy in a combo Blu-Ray/DVD plus a digital copy for $45 total. My daughter saw the third one at preschool, swore she didn’t like it, and still talks about it all the time.

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Continuing my run of catching up on movies I should have seen years ago, I watched the half-parody detective film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on the flight back from Charlotte, in which Robert Downey Jr. plays a thief turned wannabe actor dragged into a detective story via a coincidence and a sleazy Hollywood agent. It’s funny on its own, and the parody elements are clever (and clearly done in homage to the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction), although the reliance on parody made the story a little wobbly in parts. (Amazon currently has the Blu-Ray edition of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on sale for $6.99.)

Downey Jr.’s thief character, Harry Lockhart, inadvertently crashes a screen test while running from the cops and a gun-toting old lady who might have taken the whole “neighborhood watch” thing a little too seriously, after which he finds himself in LA where he’s assigned to tail a private detective played by Val Kilmer, who a little too obviously says that nothing ever happens on stakeouts. Of course, something happens, and the film is loaded with deadpan statements or seemingly minor events that merely foreshadow bigger happenings, one of many aspects of the film that dance on the the line between homage and parody.

The film is based loosely on an out-of-print Brett Halliday novel called Bodies are Where You Find Them, but the movie’s chapter titles all come from Raymond Chandler novels or stories, and the homage is more to the hard-boiled genre rather than to any one writer in particular. But the hard-boiled detective isn’t the central character – and he’s gay – while the femme fatale is less fatale and more flaky. The story mocks the routine elements to classic detective novels – you have the scene where the central character is told by some thugs to get out of town; the scene where he’s captured and has to fight and/or shoot his way out of trouble (in this case, both guys are captured together); the sexual tension between the protagonist and the lead female character (here played largely for laughs); and so on.

Downey Jr. and Kilmer are both outstanding – this might be Kilmer’s best work since Top Secret – in their roles as Harry and Gay Perry, respectively, and their interactions are far more entertaining than those between Harry and Harmony. The character of Harmony isn’t so much the problem as the actress, Michelle Monaghan, is; she seems directionless, darting in and out of flighty, obsessive, distant, and femme fatale roles but mostly just taking her shirt off a few times. Her character was the least believable of the three, though; acting not just unpredictably but irrationally, and adding little to the film. The chemistry is between Downey and Kilmer in a bromance before the term became popular and then hackneyed to the point where I just fined myself for using it. Viewed as a buddy-movie that’s also a parody of classic detective novels, it’s clever and often very funny, but that’s such a niche audience that the studio seems to have marketed it as more of a modern crime/humor film, which it isn’t.