Holly, to her everlasting credit, doesn’t care what she’s told to do-in The Nice Guys’ two-hour runtime, she becomes the best teen detective since Veronica Mars. “The thing is, to get her to that place of comfort, apart from the work that Shane did with her, Ryan put a lot of effort into that”.
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Of all the things that can be faked in a movie, chemistry is not one of them. “You can not – you can not – manufacture it”.
Two slimy guys – one a private eye, Holland March (Academy Award-nominee Ryan Gosling) and an enforcer-for- hire, Jackson Healy (Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe) – investigate the death of a porn star, Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio) in 1970s Los Angeles with the help of March’s daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice).
For financial reasons, much of “The Nice Guys” was shot in Atlanta in the winter rather than in Los Angeles.
The body count is quite high as people connected to the whistleblower film are winding up dead, and the action gets bloody. “I just want to pay homage to the time period”.
This is the kind of movie that we shouldn’t overthink.
Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling make an improbably winning comic crime-solving team in “The Nice Guys”.
A star of Crowe’s stature and experience can be relied upon to know how to make a journalist feel at ease. It’s overlong by about 15 minutes and goes in too many directions at once. “The Nice Guys” is a vintage extravaganza that brings back loud ties, large lapels, the long-gone Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard and the overall post-hippie purgatory of the era. The meta film-within-the-film is the cherry on the cake of retro detective hijinks, containing an optimistic message about the inflammatory power of cinema to affect change in the world – even if it is low-brow or smutty. In the process they stumble into a huge conspiracy that is at the core of the story, directed by Black, who penned the “Lethal Weapon” films and previously directed “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “Iron Man 3”.
Soaking Gosling (“The Big Short”) and Crowe (“Noah”) in a sweet “70s motif is a good start, and “The Nice Guys” opens with a vintage logo for the movie’s studio, Warner Bros., and the opening bars of The Temptations” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”.
The bone-crunching action stuff is watchable even if some of Gosling’s slapstick isn’t. An action comedy, it doesn’t have a great movie’s half-life, and it doesn’t produce that great movie glow.
In addition to the villain’s motivation being very relevant to 2016, Healy and March constantly reveal themselves to be less than heroic, especially in their often-shocking dialogue.
In fact, the dynamic screen duo actually enter into their unruly partnership after Crowe’s Jackson Healey breaks the arm of Gosling’s Holland March for shadowing one of Healey’s fetching clients.
“It’s f***ing subversive”, says Crowe. “There’s a couple of lines in there, where we looked at each other while we were delivering them going “Are we going to hell?” (We know his iconic Maximus from 2000’s “Gladiator” is in there somewhere, but we’re not sure where.) Hey, that voice and look works just fine for this character, who’s rough around the edges.
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That, I submit, is what’s impossible to dislike about “The Nice Guys” – the actors who are getting to be amusing men on film for the first time and taking advantage of the opportunity.
