Shane Black Christmas Movies: A Complete Guide and Ranked

Nobody does Christmas like Shane Black. His movies turn the season into a noir playground for broken men, bad decisions, and one-liners so sharp that could cut wrapping paper. So here’s the definitive countdown of his Christmas films.

If Jesus had been born in a Shane Black script, the three wise men would’ve argued about who forgot the gifts while a shoot-out happened off-screen.

You know you’re in a Shane Black Christmas movie if:

• There are bullets as loud as holiday bells, but Christmas lights gleam behind the chaos.

• The characters are flawed, cynical, maybe trying to escape their past, often loners thinking about meaning while everything blows up. 

• The Christmas setting isn’t sweetness. It’s contrast and irony: joy + pain, celebration + despair, redemption or revenge under tinsel and snow. 

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So here’s the definitive countdown of his Christmas films, the ones that take holiday season and turn it into a noir playground for broken men, bad choices, and sharp one-liners.

Top 5 Shane Black Christmas Movies

5. The Nice Guys (2016)

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

This one makes it in because of the Christmas coda at the end where Gosling and Crowe reunite after the film’s main event.  They’ve both been through a lot together, the bad guys are going to get away with it (y’know, the ones who didn’t die a horrible death), and they’re sitting in a bar and decide to open the Nice Guys Detective Agency.

It's pure Christmas because Christmas is a time for reflection, endings, and new beginning.

Where is our Nice Guys sequel by the way? Or a show? I’ll take a comic book. These guys are hilarious.

If it were a holiday drink: a late-night “holiday hangover highball” — messy but satisfying.

4. Lethal Weapon (1987)

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

The film that made Shane Black a star by selling this brand of action-comedy — and it opens under Christmas lights. A down-on-his-luck cop and his by-the-book partner fight crime in the backdrop of a Christmas tree-lot shootout and seasonal family tension. 

This might be low but we’re ranking this on Christmas appeal. It opens to “Jingle Bell Rock,” the shootout at the Christmas tree lot, the Christmas dinner at Muraugh’s house, but more than anything it’s Rigg’s suicidal depression throughout. He’s a lost soul who needs saving and he gets his wish. Well, his wish isn’t to almost die about a hundred times but you get what I mean.

Holiday drink: a “40 in a brown bag” — grim, painful maybe, but brutally honest.

3. The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Shane Black’s most underrated Christmas film — and film period. Geena Davis is a suburban mom who gets over her amnesia and realizes she was once an assassin. But now the bad guys are after her and she needs Samuel L. Jackson to help, and foils a false flag operation over the course of one Christmas. It’s like It’s a Wonderful Life meets The Manchurian Candidate which is my kind of Christmas.

This was the highest script sell in history at $4 million and it’s full of can-you-top-this Renny Harlin insanity with a really glowing Geena Davis performance at the center and enough explosions to make Santa file a noise complaint.

Holiday drink: a hot toddy… but with a fuse.

2. Iron Man 3 (2013)

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Yes, even a Marvel blockbuster can count if it carries Black’s holiday-tinged signature. It takes place during Christmas, it opens with a New Year’s party, and you’ve got a hilarious subversion of the “lonely kid on Christmas” plot with Harley Keener getting to work with his hero Tony Stark and help him get back on his feet. It might be my favorite sequence in any Marvel film. All of a sudden Tony lands in the town from a Christmas Story and is calling the kid a pussy for being sad that his father abandoned him. Amazing!

But what we find so moving about Iron Man 3 is the whole thing is Dickens-coded with Tony haunted by literal ghosts, past, present, and future at the same time, about a future he can’t control. The holiday lights frame a guy literally trying to rebuild himself — mentally and physically — in the coldest time of year. Iron Scrooge Activate!

Holiday drink: a peppermint martini. Stylish. Bittersweet. A little surreal.

1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

You want the definitive “Shane Black Christmas Noir”? This is it. A petty thief turned wannabe actor, a jaded detective, a murder mystery, all unfolding under L.A. holiday lights, cynical humor, biting dialogue and a dark, twisted underbelly. Robert Downey Jr. plays a thief who accidentally becomes an actor, Val Kilmer (R.I.P.) plays a private detective named Gay Perry (peak Shane Black name), and Michelle Monaghan is the woman in danger.

Together, they get caught up in a murder plot and they’ll need each other to survive.

We think the best Christmas stories are about the end of something bad and the hope for something better. It’s full of loneliness and melancholy, darkness punctuated by bright lights and the hope for a better tomorrow if people would just stop shooting at us.

If it was a Christmas drink it would be a big ol ‘margarita. Nothing more LA than that!

Honorable Mention: The Last Boy Scout (1991)

It’s not really a Christmas film. It’s barely acknowledged. But Bruce Willis’ daughter draws a picture of Satan Claus which gets her in trouble. It’s still fun. I never remember the plot, I just remember the moments. Bruce Willis catching his wife cheating. Dancing an Irish jig on the rafters. The football player shooting the other football player in the middle of a game. It’s so 90s.

If it was a Christmas drink it would be warm eggnog because Dad left the groceries in the car.

Final Thoughts on Shane Black Christmas

So that’s the Shane Black Christmas canon: bullets, banter, breakdowns, and just enough holiday spirit to make it go down smooth.

From all of us to all of you, merry Christmas — and watch your back, because in these movies the guy in the Santa hat usually has a gun.