Kiss, Kiss! follows a serial womanizer chasing after the girl he’s truly fallen for, while also helping his brother get together with the love of his life.
Story
Tomek has a chronic case of womanizing, which hits peak when he suffers the lowest of lows of his life — getting fired from his job, losing the apartment, and going broke. He forces his way into his estranged brother’s house.
He then gets Janek to help him track down the girl he risked it all for. He learns her name is Ola, and she’s to be married to the son of the Minister of Justice. His gig as the director of the BTS shoot of her wedding preparations gets him closer to her.
His problematic and questionable flirtations ensue, and since it’s a rom-com, they work too. Meanwhile, Tomek’s solutions to Janek’s love problem are just as bad as his tactics when it comes to his own pursuit of love.
Things go awry when he and his brother are kidnapped and learn a secret about Ola. Meanwhile, as Janek drifts further apart from Klara, he stumbles upon a secret related to Kris — the man Ola is about to be married to.
He uses this to solve a major quandary, freeing Tomek in the process as he storms off to the wedding venue, before stopping it abruptly and running off together with the bride. Janek gets his happy-ever-after as he gets engaged to Klara, before Kiss, Kiss! rolls the credits.
Performances
Mateusz Kosciukiewicz has a charming way about him but the role and the writing undo a lot of what he brings to the table with his chops.
Rafal Zawierucha is adequate as the nerdy, bumbling, and anti-social but kind-hearted Janek. Zofia Domalik is also good in her role which isn’t really given much to do other than to essentially replicate a princess-in-distress routine.
Positives
There is a much warmer, kinder, and adorable movie within Kiss, Kiss! It involves the supporting characters in the immediate periphery — Janek and Klara.
Although their love story would still count as one big cliché, it would atleast do away with the borderline criminal fervor with which Tomek and Ola’s romance unfolds and develops.
Negatives
Tomek is anti-thetical to a protagonist, let alone a protagonist of a romantic comedy. He’s an amalgamation of all the bad qualities and tendencies that have a sort of preternatural control over him, which just brings into question the headspace the writers of this film were in while writing him.
Bereft of boundaries, empathy, consent, and redeeming qualities, Tomek persists his way through Ola’s heart, who has to be an even worse character written for the movie. She has little to no aspirations and readily gives in to the criminally offbeat charms of a stalker.
Conveniently, the groom-to-be is a closeted gay man and serves merely as a tool with which the “protagonist” achieves leverage against the enemies. He uses it to free Ola’s father too, which is confounding to say the least, since him freeing Tomek from the captivity only after Kris’s homosexuality is revealed to him is not redemption.
He might have been going to get parole but throughout the movie, he uses his power to threaten innocent lives while also treating his daughter’s marriage as his ticket out of death penalty.
Janek and Klara deserve a whole lot better, and proper resolution and addressal of feelings and confessions are never presented, rendering their arc as a problematic mosaic crafted and infected by the misogynist Tomek.
Talking about the protagonist, Tomek isn’t just a nightmare of a guy to fall for, he’s a human repository of red flags in almost all the walks of life. To throw away your career and sabotage others’ as well for a girl that caught your eye is pathetic enough, but add to that his instant lack of funds and a place of stay, as well as a family he abandoned during the toughest of times, and one gets an exceptional loser like Tomek.
Verdict
Kiss, Kiss! is a poorly made, written, and paced rom-com that suffers from the added stench of a horrible protagonist. The film relies of clichés while cranking the problematic tropes usually associated to rom-com protagonists to an eleven, failing to put forth a story where any of its genres are barely even lived up to.
Also Read: Kiss, Kiss! summary & ending explained
