kiss kiss bang bang

I'd always though that Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a nickname the Japanese used for James Bond.

According to Wikipedia, however, it actually originates from an Italian movie poster for a Bond film, although I do know the Japanese use it. The point is that it's for Bond, and so I'd assumed this film would be some sort of secret agent thing. I mean, I knew it was a comedy, and I was right about that, but it turned out not to be a secret agent thing at all.

In fact, it's more of a film noire thing.

It also turned out to be a rather black comedy. And a surprisingly good one, as it raised more than a few chuckles from me.

One other thing that was interesting is that the film kinda plays with breaking the fourth wall. Basically, the narrator is aware of the audience and talks to them directly, but it's more like you're watching the film with him at home and he's chipping in with some comments.

So in other words, it's mostly as if he's on our side of the fourth wall; however, occasionally he'll interact with the film in such a way that he's both in the film and kind of like an omnipotent being as well. Basically, this is best demonstrated when he asks a couple of extras in the film to move out of the way so the camera can see something.

I've always been a sucker for that kind of stuff, so I really enjoyed this aspect of the film.

I also particularly enjoyed the way it plays with film noire conventions. I can't confess to knowing that much about film noire, but most of the tropes and clichés are sufficiently familiar to most people that it's understandable what it's doing.

But it still essentially plays it straight - the plot twists and coincidences aren't done in a jokey way, it's just that the film acknowledges they are things familiar to us all from years of watching movies.

The film is also a good length and is very well paced - you never feel it's bogging down or getting stuck and it manages to juggle its main plot and a whole bunch of subplots very well. Perhaps the only thing I'd have liked would have been a bit more about Val Kilmer's character, as he tends to turn up only when he's needed to advance a particular element of the plot, but that's not really a bigy.

About the only thing I didn't like about this was a complete lack of any extras on the DVD - there wasn't even a short featurette or trailers.