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Friday, October 23, 2009

BD impressions: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

1:58 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

Although its annoyingly smug narration device does grate at times, Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a riotously enjoyable and appropriate convoluted twenty-first century take on 40s film noir conventions, with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer serving well as a miss-matched crime-fighting duo and Michelle Monaghan having a whale of a time in the femme fatale role. It may not reinvent the wheel, but it's a hell of a lot of fun and a film that I was extremely pleased to revisit.

Image quality: My oh my, what once passed for a good transfer. It's still not bad per se, but it does look decidedly underwhelming in the company of some of the great-looking titles that have been released in the interim. Whether or not it's a reasonable epithet, this is what people mean when people refer to a film having been "Warner'd": no hideous problems, but just a generally underwhelming, passable-looking image with a "glass ceiling" effect on fine grain or detail. Blacks appear elevated, although this varies widely on a scene by scene basis, so I'm inclined to think that at least part of the "blame" can be levelled against the original photography. Compression is basically fine on this MPEG-2 BD-25 job, although there's little to tax the encoder anyway. A watchable but hardly awe-inspiring image. 7/10

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
studio: Warner; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: MPEG-2;
file size: 15.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 21.17 Mbit/sec

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