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Kiss Me Deadly Movie Review

Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 noir film directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Ralph Meeker in the main role. It is a somewhat overrated, though undeniably memorable noir.

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“You almost wrecked my car!

Well? Get in!“

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Detective Mike Hammer fights to solve the murder of a beautiful hitchhiker with a mysterious connection to the mob. Let’s first state the positives, which are the beginning and the ending. The woman running barefoot on the road in panic made for an instantly iconic, powerful opening that promised great things that never came, except for that ending of course.

The final sequence reveals the story’s major MacGuffin, which is this blinding, piercing force that annihilates the female protagonist. Obviously standing as a metaphor for the atomic bomb, this ending was pretty much a SF sequence that came as such a pleasantly brutal, fantastical surprise.

You’d think that a movie that features an incredible opening and ending would be great, but unfortunately you’d be mistaken. This is, in fact, the best example that a couple of amazing sequences do not make a movie amazing as the entirety of the middle section is so inferior that the end result is very uneven in terms of quality.

I did not care for all of the crime elements. I love noir movies when they focus more on the mystery and detective elements, but not so much on the crime stuff as I am not a fan of that genre. That resulted in me losing interest in the film pretty quickly.

It also did not help that the characterization is only medium. Ralph Meeker is memorable as this very interesting main character named Mike Hammer. Obviously, Gabrielle is a great character too. The scenes between the two are universally excellent, but all the other characters felt underdeveloped and much less interesting.

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Kiss Me Deadly is also not as sophisticated as you’d think. The paranoid elements worked, but other than those, the movie doesn’t have anything interesting to say. The cinematography is terrific as is the score while Aldrich’s directing is pretty good. I just wished for a better screenplay and stronger pacing overall.