The odd-couple outlaw duo has brought us all number of endearing character pairs such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Thelma and Louise, Lethal Weapon, Batman and Robin, Turner and Hooch. Invariably, all involve some kind of polarity be it male-female, black-white, responsible-irresonsible, smart-dumb, human-animal and so on. As the stakes escalate, our loveable couples form a kind of platonic marriage and when one or the other is shot or otherwise imperiled, their partner kneels over their crumpled body and weeps like a lover.

As Jonathan Bernstein recently pointed out in The Guardian, there's a simmering sense of homosexual romance and a blatant exploitation of the latent sexual tension in some hetero male-male partnerships in most male-male buddy films, but it's always left in the subtext. Any blockbuster buddy film that tried to openly play up an erotic interplay between, say, Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, would lose the word "blockbuster" from its description immediately and permanently. So, when we heard that Shane Black, the writer of Lethal Weapon, was making a private dick buddy film with Val Kilmer playing Robert Downey Jr's gay svengali and that at least once the pair would tongue kiss each other, we had every reason to expect disaster. Either the film would be too all-bases half-covered weird and would sink without a trace, or it would be too stridently macho - with Downey protesting about his heterosexuality in every scene and Kilmer feying around the place or dancing to disco music in a leopard-print thong - and would sink without a trace, spittle-spewing gay activists chasing it all the way to Hell.

What a relief, then, to discover that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a fabulous, and fabulously intelligent film that couldn't be bothered with any of the dreary concerns mentioned above. Kilmer and Downey Jr spar well together, in several truly hilarious exchanges, but their characters are so well drawn and the Black's script so brainy that stale home/hetero tit-for-tats over handfuls of donuts during the stakeout do not occur. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is too smart and too classy for that sort of clunkarama and at the risk of going onto movie review by computer, it really is one of the best films of the year.

Downey Jr plays Harry Lockhart, a petty thief who stumbles into a movie audition while escaping from the cops. He's so convincing that the producers snap him up and fly him to LA, where he meets top PI Gay Perry (Kilmer) at a Hollywood party. Also at the party is Harmony (Michelle Monaghan) who turns out to be the object of Harry's unrequited schoolyard love. In the tradition of Harmony's favorite La-noir detective paperbacks, young women start getting murdered and their bodies start turning up in lakes, dumpsters and Harry's hotel bathroom. A complex murder ring is underway, and somehow Harry, Perry and Harmony are at the centre of it all.

The plot gets away with itself at this point - after the movie, me and my viewing partner agreed that we had no idea who all the killed girls were, or how Harmony seemed to be involved with Perry. What we agreed on was that this was beside the point and part of the movie's chaotic, satiric tone. You can pretty much work out who the bad guys are, and who the good guys are, and you don't need to know, plotwise, much else. This isn't a brooding Los Angeles crime movie in the style of LA Confidential but a self-referential character comedy along the lines of I Heart Huckabees.

And unlke the deserted wharehouse, diesel-fuel milieu of Lethal Weapon or even Pulp Fiction, Kiss Kiss looks lush and gorgeous with several scenes set at over-the-top Hollywood parties with glistening cocktails in the hands of young and beautiful people and other sequences filmed in the lobbies and rooftop bars of some of LA's most stunning new hotels. Majestic helicopter shots of glittering nightime LA recur and an electric purple wig makes an important appearance. Downey Jr and Monaghan share good charisma and their second-gear attraction is sexy and sincere.

Val Kilmer looks James Bond handsome and makes up for his horrid appearance as Phillip II of Macedon in Alexander with a sterling performance as Perry. Little touches such as Perry knowing the cast of Xanadu and keeping a decorative miniature pistol in his undies were the highlights of the film for me.

Absolutely fabulous.

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