They say film critics are a jaded lot, but what about the screenwriters, who see their words bastardized to fit the demands of actors, executives, and Midwestern test-screening audiences? Shane Black, once a rock star among screenwriters (he hatched the Lethal Weapon franchise while still in film school), has tasted his share of disillusionment. He was on top of the world until the dual disasters of Last Action Hero and The Long Kiss Goodnight effectively forced him into early retirement. Now he has something to prove.

By naming his comeback project Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Black playfully suggests we can now expect more than just another ''mindless'' action movie from this jilted player. If this pulp-fiction riff sometimes feels about a decade behind the times, Black can be excused for not evolving into the Age of Tarantino. After all, he has been in deep freeze since the early '90s (how else to explain details like the 15-years-dated dig at The Hunt for Red October?).

Black's writing is no less cocky than we remember it, and the movie's self-referential snarkiness borders on too clever for its own good, but there's no denying the fresh new edge to this one-time Hollywood hotshot's directorial debut. By tipping his hat to '40s-era dimestore detective novels, Black is operating in a sort of nostalgic pre-Tarantino Twilight Zone where it still feels funky and original to have characters call attention to the fact that they're in a movie ("My name is Harry Lockhart. I'll be your narrator," Robert Downey Jr. announces), while other scenes play the wink-wink game where characters debate how things would happen differently "in the movies."

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a movie obsessed more with the act of telling a story than the story itself, which explains why, when the movie's finally over, less than half the audience will have understood the finer points of the mystery. That's just as well, since the explanation itself isn't nearly as satisfying as the journey, which Black paves with one dynamite scene after another between his three central characters: a petty thief-turned-actor (Robert Downey Jr.), a small-town girl (Michelle Monaghan) hoping to make it big in Hollywood, and a private eye (Val Kilmer) who's none too private about his persuasion, earning him the nickname "Gay Perry."

Black paints his Tinseltown folk as a bunch of shallow wannabes constantly searching for a break, but their desperation sets the perfect tone for Lockhart's misadventures in La La Land. At one point, he makes a crack about how all the women in Hollywood are damaged goods, but judging by the juicy role Black has written for Monaghan, the complicated personalities who gravitate toward show business clearly interest him more than their well-adjusted counterparts.

Black has enormous affection for all his characters, however imperfect (although I suspect he concocted "Gay Perry" as an excuse to crack a few jokes about homosexuals, the same way Tarantino casts African Americans so he can get away with using the N-word). That's how Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang counters Kael's criticism: Black could make a convoluted detective movie blindfolded, but he does it one better by shifting the attention from the romance and bullets to the hard-boiled characters caught in the crossfire.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]