Shane Black – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
As is the case with a lot of the directors in this list, there wasn’t much in Shane Black’s back catalogue that suggested that he could be trusted with a $200m budget and would deliver a film that seemed to please pretty much everyone, as well as bringing in north of $1.2bn at the worldwide box office. Incredible, really. He was very clearly established as a formidable screenwriter, having delivered Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but his directorial experience consisted of exactly one film, the aforementioned KKBB which he had directed 8 years prior.
Now don’t get me wrong, KKBB is superb – funny, clever, thrilling and engaging, but it has nothing like the scale of a Marvel property, especially one as fundamental as Iron Man.
Perhaps Marvel looked at Black’s work with RDJ on KKBB and decided that this would be the key to success – that the director and the star had something mystical and wonderful between them that could be captured and replicated and that the rest of the elements would either fall into place or take care of themselves. Big budget, CG-augmented, half hour long set pieces were well outside Black’s repertoire, but he took to it like a duck to water, delivering one Marvel’s best films.
But as good as IM3 was, it isn’t as good as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – a twisty-turny film noir full of great lines, fantastic characters and a fourth-wall breaking tendency that works beautifully. Does that mean Shane Black needs to be cut loose with Deadpool? It would certainly be interesting, but I’m more intrigued by what he’ll make of Predator……
