Still, you can see why Crowe would sign up.
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“The Nice Guys” grooves into theaters May 20.
Gosling and Crowe make a great team that rivals some of the best duos in the past and they had a terrific script to work with which I’m sure helped.
The actors have even gone so far as to film a series of couples therapy videos.
“Nah. It’s just a natural thing”, Crowe explains during an exclusive interview in Los Angeles. “You can not – you can not – manufacture it”.
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice, Keith David, Margaret Qualley, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger.
That’s par for the course with “The Nice Guys”. “And I knew it was going to be fun”.
With a running time of 1 hour, 56 minutes, “The Nice Guys” has a little extra padding that isn’t necessary, i.e., a trippy dream sequence that’s just weird and devoid of laughs, and a mini-subplot about one of Holly’s friends.
This is the kind of movie that we shouldn’t overthink. He looks into it and sees Steve McQueen, that macho ’70s star who kept his mouth shut.
The emphasis here isn’t on the complexity or hopelessness of their case, which involves many murders and a conspiracy reaching up to the boardrooms of the big three American carmakers – whose logos get prominent play onscreen.
The Nice Guys is out in the States on the 20th of May, here in the United Kingdom on the 3rd of June. As in most Los Angeles noir, the story’s range is big enough to incorporate low life and high life and to suggest that the two are closer than people think.
“But in reality, those four people who are reputationally hard just care about their job”.
This literal break-neck opening sets in motion a tale as shaggy as ’70s carpet, though not as soft.
Writer-director Shane Black, responsible for creating the buddy-action franchise of “Lethal Weapon”, excels at black comedy and snappy dialogue, but executed it savvier and clearer in the overlooked “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer in 2005.
After Russell Crowe read the screenplay for “The Nice Guys”, the Oscar victor felt “it was a terrific script, but it was clear to me that the other male lead was so key”.
THE NICE GUYS is exactly what the old time Warner Bros-Silver Pictures logos promise at the start. I think his daughter is the real detective. It really spoke to me as soon as I read it. It was presented as a comedy script, and I’m reading it and I’m like “This is way more serious than a comedy”.
They’ve never worked together before, but I daresay they will work together again.
There are indeed several more layers to The Nice Guys than we’ve come to expect from our mainstream action comedies.
On paper, Jackson Healy (Crowe) and Holland March (Gosling) aren’t so nice.
“It’s f***ing subversive”, says Crowe. They did such a remarkable job on costumes and production design that most of that work was done for us. Is it ironic, or more obviously on goal, that Basinger won an Oscar opposite Crowe in the far more serious L.A. noir L.A. Confidential? I’m always amazed by that. It’s a good little mystery, full of well-placed clues and clever turns, and Black and Bagarozzi have seen enough of these movies to know when to throw in a surprise flip, how to anticipate our expectations and turn them back on us.
Ryan Gosling has given up smoking after gassing himself with cigarettes while shooting “The Nice Guys”.
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“I’ve gotta hold fast to the way I make decisions about things”.
