Gay gumshoe with no camp

A buddy movie with a difference: Shane Black's directorial debut (his past screenplays include Lethal Weapon) is witty, audacious and innovative. It's indebted to both Quentin Tarantino and Billy Wilder - but it's also a bit too clever for its own good.

Harry (Robert Downey Jr) is a petty thief with a kind of dog-eared charm who auditions for a film, is sent to LA and there is teamed up with a gay private eye (Val Kilmer) to get in character before the big-time screen test. The pair, improbably, get mixed up with a real murder mystery during which Harry tries to play the kind of hardboiled detective found in the pulp fiction that his girl (Michelle Monaghan) avidly reads.

That's roughly the plot, though it frequently relapses, between laughs, into
virtual incomprehensibility. But we aren't supposed to worry too much about that. The point of the film lies in the kookiness of the script and the central performances. If you like Downey Jr and Kilmer, both acquired tastes, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang will work well. If you don't, the uneven nature of the whole may rankle.

Kilmer plays his gay character perfectly straight. No camping whatsoever. Downey Jr, however, could never play anything entirely straight and gives us a Harry who, even when his finger is cut off, or when crooks attach electrodes to his private parts, maintains an outrageously naïve sense that things will turn out all right in the end.

Thanks largely to him, and a script bent on a fiercely jokey abandon, you can indulge in the proverbial laugh a minute. But sterner editing might have transformed this cod film noir into a more convincing whole.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Cert: 15