Review of “Kiss Me Deadly”

The first installment of a planned spy franchise centered around gay former government agent Jacob Keane, Kiss Me Deadly gets about half of it right. Fortunately for a gay audience hungry for entertainment that reflects the complexities of their lives, the parts that are right are the ways in which the film integrates the sexuality of its protagonist (played by chiseled-from-limestone out actor Robert Gant) into the spy genre.

But unfortunately for fans of secret agent thrillers and mysteries, the parts that it gets wrong are … well, pretty much everything else.

The story begins on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Keane and his partners Marta (Shannen Doherty, in a colossally unfortunate wig) and Jared (Fraser Brown) are attempting to either get a man out of the country or learn something important from him. We’re not sure which, as before either assignment is completed there’s an explosion and Marta is sent flying, with the mystery man lost in the flames.

A few days later Keane and his crew learn that the Cold War has ended and that their jobs as operatives are therefore pretty much dunzo. The fact that this information is imparted to them by John Rhys-Davies from Raiders of the Lost Ark does little to numb the blow.

We fast-forward to the present via a montage of major political events moving through Bush, Clinton, another Bush, the World Trade Center attacks and the attacks on the Pentagon. But don’t get your hopes up that the film is going to have much to say about current events or shifting political regimes, because it doesn’t. As Miss Scarlet simply put it, “Communism is just a red herring.”

By this point, Jacob has retired from his operative-gig and is now living a comfortable life in Milan as a photographer specializing in rather tacky underwear campaigns. He kisses his assistant and has two of the male models pose together, so we realize rather quickly that Jacob is gay. We also learn that he has a child with a smokin’-hot lesbian mother.

But Jacob’s underwear-swathed Italian idyll is about to be shattered by the reappearance of Marta, who leaves an urgent message on his answering machine that she is coming to Milan and must see him. He drops the kid off at the smokin’ lesbian’s house (much to her chagrin, as she was in the middle of a round of “how’s-your-madre” with her lover) and heads to the train station to meet Marta.

When he gets there he learns that she has amnesia (she doesn’t even know who he is and doesn’t remember calling him) and is being pursued by an evil thug. How do we know he’s evil? He frosts his hair. Always a dead giveaway.

From here on the movie is all about learning why Marta can’t remember anything and figuring out what Frosty the Hitman and his disarmingly attractive thug henchman (played by gay retired rugby player Ian Roberts) are after. Jacob has some pieces of the puzzle and must reconnect with his old agency after 20 years of retirement.

As he does so, he begins to wonder if they may be in on the scheme. He’s also not telling Marta everything he knows, which leads the forgetful femme fatale to become suspicious of him … especially when she regains memories of sleeping with the dashing (if dour) former spy.

After Jacob kisses his lover goodbye and hits the road with Marta, the action moves to St. Albans, then to London, Zurich, and finally back again to Milan, keeping up a pace brisk enough to make the casual viewer lose track of various dropped story threads and overlook some gaping holes in the plot.

Along the way there’s some skin (though most of it unfortunately doesn’t belong to either Gant or Roberts) and here!’s now-trademark gratuitous full-frontal male nudity which is frequently more distracting than anything else thanks to the liberties that the narrative takes in order to fit in the pickle shots.

For example: At one point, Jacob realizes that his cell phone is being traced, and in order to get rid of it in a crowded bar he seduces a young Italian man in the bathroom, promising to meet him at a sex club as he slyly slips the phone into the guy’s pocket.