“My name is Harry Lockhart. I’ll be your narrator. Welcome to LA. Welcome to the party.” Robert Downey Jr, there, in the opening beats of the sharpest, funniest film at the festival: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The directing bow of Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black – off the map for 10 years – it sees Downey Jr’s thief-cum-actor hook up with Val Kilmer’s PI to unravel a deadly mystery while wooing Michelle Monaghan. “It’s so great to be here,” a sprightly Downey Jr said. “And to be here with something that’s so well received, that felt like such a familial project. That doesn’t suck, basically...”
“This was a perfect opportunity for us,” confirms producer Joel Silver. “We needed the buzz and the excitement Cannes could provide if the picture played as well as we thought it would.” It did. Sweetly soured by Black’s experiences of LA, Kiss Kiss is a buddy movie with a pop-culture-cannibalising self-referential streak wider than Quentin Tarantino’s arse. Acidic and hilarious, it was the arthouse snobs’ guilty pleasure and Total Film's guiltless joy. As Black himself told us, “It should be called Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Dollars Dollars.” Expect it in the autumn.
