The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

21. 2005 - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Honourable Mentions: Brokeback Mountain, Good Night, and Good Luck., Munich

Shane Black may not have originated the buddy cop genre, but he damn well perfected it. Whether it was under the directorship of Richard Donner in Lethal Weapon or Tony Scott in The Last Boy Scout, Black's cutting dialogue, noir sensibilities, and his approach to themes of masculinity and mental frailty helped define an era in action cinema, culminating in the ill-fated but still under-appreciated meta genre parody Last Action Hero in 1993.

The failure of Last Action Hero led to a bit of a lull in Black's career, during which he scripted the overlooked Christmas classic, The Long Kiss Goodnight, directed by Renny Harlin. It wouldn't be until 2005, however, that Black was finally able to marshal one of his scripts as a director, and it turned out to be his best film ever - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

One of the first steps in a journey that would take Robert Downey Jr. to the pinnacle of Hollywood, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was Black's love-letter to hardboiled fiction, rooting the film in Hollywood scandal and hubris as down-on-his-luck petty criminal Harry Lockhart (RDJ) blags his way into the movies and ends up uncovering a sordid conspiracy with the reluctant help of PI Perry van Shrike, played by the late, great Val Kilmer.

Michelle Monaghan is also along for the ride as a flagging actress and childhood friend of Harry's, Harmony Lane, who carries the soul of the film with her love of trashy detective fiction.

What's so impressive about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as a directorial debut isn't just that it recollects the technical prowess of Black's former genre collaborators Donner, Harlin, and John McTiernan, but that it cultivates so effortlessly its own imprint of L.A. This is a tinsel town in the most literal sense - an absurd festive playground masking a dark interior, but one we all can't help but want to drink up all the same.

Die Hard may have the monopoly on festive action movie discourse, but with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Black once again proved that he is the master of that domain.