Kiss Me Deadly is about a sleazy private detective, Mike Hammer, who picks up an ill-fated hitchhiker one night. The pair get run off the road, she turns up dead (but not from the car accident) and he gets busy trying to figure out who killed her. He does this both because they tried to kill him, too, and because he thinks there may be an angle for him in it.
I’m going to have to be honest and say it has been my least favorite film so far.
**Spoilers follow.** Mike Hammer was interesting enough as an anti-hero, and there are certainly some enjoyable bit characters, but as a whole I thought the whole thing was uninteresting. The plot is wildly implausible and senseless, the characters don’t make much sense, nothing much is explained to us, and the climax features bizarrely inaccurate nuclear science. The mystery never even gets solved, Hammer just pieces together the correct name of the villain and gets to his house in time to get shot in the gut and get his partner out of the house before the lady who opened the plutonium lights on fire. Yeah, you read that sentence correctly. WTF?
A huge cult favorite, and celebrated on a number of top film lists, it left me mostly underwhelmed.
