TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,' 'Zathura' and 'Derailed'


Longer versions of reviews in today's Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print versions.




Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
(wr./dir. Shane Black)

Shane Black was the king of the spec-script in the late '80s and early '90s -- when his screenplays for "Lethal Weapon," "The Last Boy Scout" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight" sold for ungodly, record-breaking sums.

At the time, he was (unfairly) blamed in some quarters for everything nasty and dumb and excessive about the buddy-cop boom that "Lethal Weapon" essentially created. But looking back now, it's easier to see that Black had something all too many modern action-movie scribes lack: a distinctive voice and actual ideas.

His dialogue was whip-smart and darkly funny. He was great at creating (and torturing) self-loathing loser protagonists. He loved to explore what he described in a recent Creative Screenwriting interview as "chivalry … in the service of women who might not be quite so moral." And he had a knack for writing movies that worked as action pictures while goofing on action clichés (see his scripts for "Boy Scout" and "Long Kiss" -- films that earned cult followings after underperforming at the box office).

Well. After ditching Hollywood for nearly a decade, Black is back. He's written and directed the low-budget comedy thriller "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang." And it's everything that was great about his earlier work. Only smarter.

This bloody, self-referential, laugh-out-loud mystery starts out like a high-concept comedy. While fleeing a botched toy-store burglary in New York, a scatterbrained thief named Harry (Robert Downey, Jr.) hides out in a movie audition.

And gets the lead role.

Soon, he's in L.A. -- on a research ride-along with private eye "Gay" Perry (Val Kilmer). But after they see two masked men ditch a body in a lake, Black ditches the movie-industry comedy; Harry never even sets foot on a movie set. Instead, we get a twisty tangle of murder, frame-ups and stupid lies. And poor Harry weathers bullets, amputations, electroshock torture to the nethers, withering insults from Perry, and physically painful rejections from his childhood crush, a loopy actress named Harmony (Michelle Monaghan).

"Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is less interested in its mystery (which only really makes sense on a second viewing) and more interested in its characters, who riddle each other with acid one-liners. And it all comes off as Black's slightly self-recriminating riff on the hard-boiled genre (and the town) that made him rich.

God, there are so many things I loved about this movie. I loved so many individual moments, lines and scenes, I actually had a lot of trouble figuring out what to single out for the print version of this review:

• For starters, Downey's jittery voice-over narration is just hilariously flaky -- stopping and re-starting and digressing so many times, it literally stops the film dead in its tracks (but in a funny way). He backtracks. He apologizes. He chastises himself. Late in the film, he asks, "So? Have you solved The Case of the … uh … Dead People in L.A.?"

• I loved that the movie has a sort of deconstructed '80s action vibe, right down to a darkly cheesy end-credits song (sung by Downey, BTW). The film feels cokey and neon-lit and Los Angeles-decadent -- but with a certain moral remove, a raised eyebrow. Black makes wry sport of L.A. manners and the city's hopeless dreamers -- largely through (a) Harry's bungled conversations with women and (b) Monaghan's manic, sexy woman-child, a 34-year-old never-been whose career peaked with a beer commercial.



• I loved that Harmony Faith Lane is the sort of L.A. woman we don't see in the movies much -- a pretty, smart, slightly crazy, relatively young has-been. And as played by Monaghan, she's riveting. When she sighs and laments to Harry, "I didn't get famous," it's surprisingly sweet and sort of heartbreaking.

• I loved that the pre-credits sequence -- set to John Ottman's gorgeous, sad circus of a score -- is so … wrong. It ends on a man about to smack a little girl after she says, with an adorable sparkle in her eyes, "I'm going to be an actress." It's a perfect, perverse summary of the movie's major concern: the collision of youthful dreams and harsh reality.

(Of course, Black loves these sorts of tonal mash-ups. KKBB is the sort of film where finding a severed spider leg in your bra leads to a tender bonding moment. This is Black's third action script set around Christmas [the other two I can think of being "Lethal Weapon" and "Long Kiss"]. And there's a scene featuring Abe Lincoln and Elvis that starts out as the most self-referential gag in the movie -- and ends with Harmony getting the film's roughest reality check.)

• I loved the Saul Bass-inspired opening credits -- which you can watch in all their stylishly animated glory right here.

• I loved that Harry keeps losing his severed finger. I loved the Russian-roulette interrogation scene. I loved the way Val Kilmer ducked a shot glass. I loved every sarcastic word out of Kilmer's mouth:

"Go home. Sleep badly. If you have any questions, hesitate to call."

"My dad used to beat me in Morse Code."

"This isn't good cop/bad cop. This is fag and New Yorker."

• I loved that Harry and Harmony are obsessed with a fictional paperback gumshoe named Jonny Gossamer -- even though Jonny's been publicly disowned by his own (fictional) creator. (What does he know, Harry jokes at one point; he's just the writer.) As Harry and Harmony model their investigative tactics on their fictional hero -- occasionally but not always getting smacked in the face for it -- Black revels in his own love (and distrust) of the power of pulp.

I could go on and on. The movie's just clever and funny and black-hearted and smart and hard-boiled and thrilling and well-acted and ambitious as all hell. Some critics have dismissed "Kiss Kiss" as a glib, empty pastiche, but I thought Black pulled off a pretty wonderful balancing act -- working full-blooded characters you care about into a story that spends a lot of time making fun of itself. That's hard to pull off. This is one of Downey's most enjoyable performances, and one of Kilmer's funniest. It's a relationship comedy wrapped in sharp talk and car chases, a triumphant comeback for Shane Black, and one of the year's best movies.

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Zathura
(dir. Jon Favereau)

All the people describing "Zathura" as "Jumanji in Space" are absolutely right, of course. Based on another Chris Van Allsburg story, with many of the same producers, the movie's sort of a "sidequel" to that 1995 hit, telling the same basic story: A magical board game unleashes monsters, tears a house to shreds and affirms family values in the process.

But "Zathura," I'd argue, is the better film.

This time around, the titular game is a marvelous, slightly beat-up tin-toy contraption, festooned with "Buck Rogers" finned rocketships. (I totally want one.) Awkward moppet Danny (Jonah Bobo) finds it in the basement of his single dad's (Tim Robbins') house -- a house that Danny describes as "creepy," but which is of course one of those gorgeous Craftsman-era fixer-uppers that probably go for at least half a million.

Danny has a bickering, mutually jealous relationship with his older brother Walter (Josh Hutcherson) -- and it probably goes without saying that that relationship is put to the test when they start playing Zathura and it shoots their "creepy" house into outer space, freezing their teenage sister (Kristen Stewart) into a cryogenically preserved mannequin.

By the way, I loved that "outer space" in this movie was in no way literal: The brothers battle lizard aliens, pick up a stranded astronaut (Dax Shepard), wish on shooting stars and flee a giant rocket-powered robot, and everything's rendered in that Art Deco "Flash Gordon" style where all the spaceships have fins and flame-jets and you can breathe in space. It's dream-logical and gorgeous and retro and surprisingly artful, using a lot of practical models and effects -- the giant robot is just killer -- and it's a surprisingly confident departure for director Jon Favreau, who previously helmed "Made" and "Elf."

Although the drama suffers to a degree from the episodic story structure (the boys bicker, draw a card from the game, something happens to them, they bicker some more, they draw another card), "Zathura" feels less like "Jumanji" and more like a really great episode of Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories" TV series -- or like a serious upgrade of one of those second-tier family adventures that Spielberg used to produce but not direct in the '80s. Favreau gets great performances out of the kids while selling his simple family-friendly message. And, again, that giant robot is just killer (and, for the record, voiced by Frank Oz). Your children will probably love it, and you won't feel lobotomized in the process.


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Derailed
(dir. Mikael Håfström)

"Derailed" wants desperately to posit the mother of all moral quandaries. Here's the setup:

Charles (Clive Owen) is an ad executive who's bored with his job, his marriage and the constant care and feeding of his diabetes-afflicted daughter. He meets a sexy, married banker named Lucinda (Jennifer Aniston) on a train. She says, "I cheat clients"; he says, "I con housewives." They decide to check into a flea-bag hotel for some cheap, adulterous thrills.

But then a thug (Vincent Cassel) breaks into the hotel room, steals Charles' wallet and rapes Lucinda for what seems like hours.

Afterward, Lucinda says she doesn't want to call the police and destroy their marriages. But pretty soon the thug starts calling Charles at home -- threatening to reveal the affair unless he forks over six figures' worth of money earmarked for the miracle drug that will cure Charles' daughter.

So what does Charles do? Destroy two marriages and name a rape victim, or save a little girl's life?

Personally, I think a little girl's life kind of trumps everything, but what do I know? Director Mikael Håfström's adaptation of James Siegel's novel seems to be shooting for that sort of depraved-but-titilating, Adrian Lyne/"Fatal Attraction" moral-quandary vibe.

But "Derailed" -- while fast-paced and blessed with Cassel's sarcastically charismatic performance and a few sharp moments -- suffers from too many crucial shortcomings.

For starters, everything's grimy and humorless in a way that infects even the normally ebullient Aniston. There's simply very little sexual heat between her and Owen -- and that heat is unfortunately crucial to selling the story that follows their disastrous tryst.

Even worse, Owen's character is too unpleasant to root for: He puts secrecy before his daughter, shelters a computer thief (RZA) at work and covers up several acts of bloody mayhem that get semi-innocent people … well, that would be telling.

And while the premise seems morally fraught, Håfström and scenarist Stuart Beattie constantly pull their punches at the last minute, in too-tidy ways that I can't really discuss. Actually, here's one example: Cassel breaks in on Charles and Lucinda before they can even consummate their surprisingly un-steamy affair. That's right: All this angst and blackmail, and they never even had sex.

The whole movie's like that. It works overtime to keep Charles in peril -- sometimes skillfully -- but it never really puts him in the sort of deeper, hands-dirtying moral bind that would make the drama truly compelling.

Don't miss this 'Kiss'
Tossed in space
Not quite on track
(The Oregonian, Nov. 11, 2005)


Posted: Fri - November 11, 2005 at 12:31 AM        

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