Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Shane Black's directorial debut arrives as a neo-noir pastiche with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek, and it has aged into a curious artifact of mid-2000s cultural inventory. The most conspicuous item is Val Kilmer's "Gay" Perry van Shrike, a private detective who announces his orientation at every opportunity and also kicks down doors and shoots people. Black has said he wanted to break a stereotype, and the gesture registers, though the film plays the character for comedy at nearly every turn. It is a subversion with a laugh track attached, which places it somewhere in the middle of the register and no higher.

Elsewhere the pickings thin out. Michelle Monaghan's Harmony carries a grim backstory involving her sister and a sexually abusive father, and the film treats that material with a straight face, but it never builds a thesis about women from it. She remains a romantic objective with a tragic footnote. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Rockmond Dunbar as the lone exception playing a thug, and the two heavies are named Mr. Fire and Mr. Frying Pan, which is the extent of the film's engagement with anything racial. No environmental content. No body politics. No neurodivergence. No historical revision. The Hollywood satire needles vanity and phoniness without ever reaching for a wallet.

Craft and timing remain. The film winks at its audience constantly and lectures no one, which in this climate reads as a small mercy. It is a well-made piece of genre recreation with one progressive flourish, delivered as a punchline, and the years have not added much to it.