After a dinner conversation that revolved around movies featuring Robert Downey Jr., we shifted to the living room to scan the movies with Downey in them that were available for streaming and settled on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang because we were in the mood for a comedy.

I think My Darling B was the first to say, “Well, that was weird,” after we finished watching it. We all said it, but she was the first out of the gate. I think I just agreed with her. Tim’s version was a little more specific: “The weirdest thing about it was how much I liked Val Kilmer’s part.”

Val Kilmer played the detective; Robert Downey Jr. was Kilmer’s bumbling sidekick. Sort of. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what Downey’s part in the film was. He started off narrating the film, which always forces me to wonder about every narrated scene: Would this scene be okay without the narration? Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer’s yes, and that held true here, I think. There were a couple of throwaway visual jokes that depended on the narration, but I got the impression that they had Downey narrate mostly because Kilmer was a detective and Downey pretended to be a detective.

So, narration, because detectives. But a snarky kind of narration, so not a run of the mill detective film. And the film ended with Downey doing a quick recap of events from his desk in the style of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that I really can’t explain.

In summary, a couple of fairly good chuckles, Val Kilmer was surprisingly good but mostly it was confusing. If you can come up with a more coherent summary of the film than that, please let me know, thanks.