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Written by: Brett Halliday (novel "Bodies Are Where You Find Them"), Shane Black (screen story, screenplay)
Directed by: Shane Black
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bernsen, Shannyn Sossamon
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
After being mistaken for an actor, a New York thief is sent to Hollywood to train under a private eye for a potential movie role, but the duo end up in a murder mystery.
Verdict
It's a fun movie. Nearly everything Kilmer says as Perry is quotable. His new assistant Harry is
the outsider that likes detective stories and finds he's in one. He's
also quite verbose, always commenting on the situation
or trying to play the tough guy. It rarely works out as Harry faces one
hardship after another. All of this, and he's only in Los Angeles posing
as an actor to get out of being arrested. Like any good
detective book, two unrelated cases always intersect, and that's the
case here as a confluence of events bring this group of people together to solve a murder. While the mystery is a bit complex and the duo of Perry and Harry pose as comic distraction, they're also what makes this movie so fun.
Watch It.
Review
The book that partially inspired the movie was published in 1941. This was Black's directorial debut, though the first screenplay he wrote was Lethal Weapon (1987). Recently he wrote and directed The Predator (2018) and Play Dirty (2025).
Harry (Robert Downey Jr.) is a thief that lucks into an acting audition while running from the cops. His emotional reading is mistaken for method acting, and he's sent to Hollywood. There's a lot of fourth wall breaking as Harry relays the story, and it also sets up the underlying style and goal of the movie.
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| Val Kilmer, Robert Downey Jr. play Perry van Shrike, Harry Lockhart |
To prepare Harry for the role, he begins training with private detective Perry (Val Kilmer). Kilmer is great as the sardonic, witty foil to Harry who is out of his depth. On their first stakeout they just happen to witness two men driving a car into a lake. Perry assumes they must be hiding something in the car, discovering a body. Unfortunately while shooting the trunk's lock he shot the victim, though fortunate for him she was already dead.
Harry runs into his childhood crush at a Hollywood party. She thinks he's a detective with his connection to Perry and later meets him at his hotel room, asking him to look for her missing sister. Of course he agrees to help her, but what he doesn't realize is that the men that drove the car into the lake spotted Harry and Perry retrieving the body from the car and planted it in Harry's hotel room to frame him.
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| Michelle Monaghan, Robert Downey Jr. play Harmony Lane, Harry Lockhart |
It's a wild story and complete fun with the extreme coincidences feeding into the adventure. This embraces the film noir genre while also having fun with it. Harry tries to extract information from a thug though intimidation. He puts a single bullet in the revolver and kills the guy on the first shot, defying the typical movie trope. Harry thought the chances of killing him on the first shot would have been lower. Perry is dumbfounded Harry actually loaded the gun.
When they're captured and prepared to be tortured, Perry taunts the thug guarding them into electrocuting Harry who is less than happy about the outcome. That distraction does allow Perry to free them.
It's a movie hinging on coincidence, but this is so much fun that it doesn't matter. The point is to modernize the old detective novel. It never relies on the usual tropes, defying expectations at every turn. Perry and Harry are a great pair and even manage to unravel the sprawling mystery, leading to a shootout and chase.
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