Kirk Warren (Giulano Gemma) is about to be executed when he receives a pardon on the condition that he steal a formula the government wants before it can fall into the hands of the mysterious "Mr. X." Warren also wants to be paid a million dollars and when his liaison balks, decides he'll steal the formula for himself. He enlists the help of several aides, including his girlfriend Alina Shakespeare (Nieves Navarro), pulls off the robbery, then is caught in a cat and mouse game of trying to get paid for the formula as he dodges friend and foe alike. There's an acrobat, a parrot named Socrates, a talking pigeon, and an elderly lady who wields a mean cane. Warren is given a gun that emits laughing gas instead of bullets. Of all the James Bond parodies that were made, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has to be one of the worst. Gemma, with his male model good looks, makes a convincing enough lover boy and anti-hero, there are some good settings, including Venice, and one decent scene when Warren has to parachute out of a plane onto a mountaintop, but mostly the movie is like one of the worst episodes of Batman and about as funny. It's interesting to note Warren uses a car that can go underwater, as in a much later James Bond movie with Roger Moore. The picture's score has musical diversity but is almost uniformly lousy. A dubbed Italian-Spanish co-production.
Verdict: Unfunny and atrocious. *.
Interesting...did you happen to see the American film with Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. bearing the same title? Was it supposed to be a remake of this older film? I was not aware of this one at all...
ReplyDeleteThis title became famous when New Yorker critic Pauline Kael used it as the title of one of her collections of film criticism. I don't think the Kilmer/Downey film, which I have not yet seen but am aware of, is a remake of this one, I think the producers just couldn't resist using the name one more time. I believe the later film is about the movie business with one of those actors playing a gay cop and the other an actor who plays a cop, or vice versa.
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