I’m Jack Hammer. This is my review of “Kiss Me Deadly”
Some dames are a whole lotta trouble. The kind of trouble that gets a guy like me involved, and then you’re stuck with it. This flick, Kiss Me Deadly, from 1955, is all about that kind of trouble. The director, Robert Aldrich, pulls you into a world that’s been chewed up and spit out. Everything’s crooked, nobody’s clean, and the air itself smells like lies and cheap booze.
The whole thing starts with a dame in a trench coat and nothing else, running down the highway in the dead of night. She flags down my namesake, Mike Hammer, a private eye who’s got a reputation for being rough around the edges and not much else. He’s driving his fancy car, minding his own business, and then she’s there, and suddenly he’s in a world of hurt. He gets mixed up in a business that’s way over his head, with a mystery nobody wants him to solve. The cops are on his back, the Feds are watching from the shadows, and every crook in the city is looking for the same thing he is: a glowing box. They call it “the Great Whatzit.”
Hammer ain’t like me. He’s more muscle than brains, a guy who uses a sock in the jaw where a question might do. His beautiful and loyal secretary, Velda, tries to keep him on the straight and narrow, but he’s a freight train on a single track. He’s got one thing on his mind, and that’s getting to the bottom of this mess, no matter who he has to break to do it. The picture is full of lowlifes and femme fatales and a whole bunch of people who look like they’ve seen too much.
This isn’t your daddy’s mystery. The whole picture stinks of a new kind of fear, the kind that came right out of the labs and settled over the world like a poison fog. It’s a dark ride, full of twists and turns, and a hell of an ending that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about justice. You’ll be sitting on the edge of your seat, wondering what’s in that box, and whether Hammer can make it out alive.
