A Shane Black Christmas
Shane Black was once the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Today he is just another writer-director for hire, having recently failed to rejuvenate the Predator franchise. For his devotees, he is admired for writing the most action-packed films ever set during the Holiday Season. As a cinema-goer, Black always enjoyed the disquieting notion of a suspense film that used the cheerfulness of Christmas as its contrasting canvas.
Starting with Lethal Weapon (1987), Black created the template for his Christmas movie formula. Take one psychologically damaged protagonist, pair him/her with a reluctant racially/sexually contrasting sidekick, add in some loathsome money-grubbing villains, then sprinkle liberally with humour and fetishistic gunplay while Christmas songs like Jingle Bell Rock play on the soundtrack. With this, his first produced screenplay, Black claimed the dubious honour of helping to turn Mel Gibson into a mega-star but, more importantly, it was responsible for igniting the explosion of modern action films by grounding them with such relatable contemporary issues as race and suicidal depression.
He followed it with The Last Boy Scout (1991), starring a post Die Hard Bruce Willis as a boozy detective trying to solve some murders connected to sports betting. This was Black’s first attempt at a hard boiled P.I. plot and although it’s slickly entertaining, the script’s male chauvinism belies the writer’s adolescent tastes.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) is Black’s distaff take on the buddy action film and he couldn’t have had better casting than Geena Davis, as an amnesiac housewife/former spy opposite Sam Jackson’s lippy lowlife private eye. Featuring Black’s most well drawn female character, this is also his only authentically cold Christmas movie, with real snow courtesy of its many Ontario-filmed locations.
Black finally got his first chance to direct one of his scripts with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), a hip homage to the pulp mysteries he loved as a kid. Robert Downey Jr. stars in a role he was playing in real-life at the time, as a Hollywood actor and addict whose louche lifestyle lands him in an inheritance plot of murder, money, and sexual abuse. This was Black’s comeback project after many years and it remains his most personal statement about the excesses of the film business and how it nearly destroyed his own life and career.
Downey gave Black his second crack at writing and directing when he hired him to make Iron Man 3 (2013), a clever reworking of Black’s original character ideas for Lethal Weapon 2. Once again Black has Downey exploring the neurotic side of heroism as superhero Tony Stark grapples with near crippling PTSD. Paying his most mature tribute to the holidays yet, Black’s uses the Marvel mythology to make a compassionate statement on the family, by having children, female partners, and “brothers’’ all play a part in saving the world from corporate villainy.
Aware that fans now anticipated his Christmas obsession, Black featured an epilogue scene in his latest detective yarn set in the 1970s, The Nice Guys (2016), as his two heroes enjoyed a chummy chat at a Christmas tree decorated bar. It was an amusing coda to another of Shane Black’s uniquely festive oeuvre.
