What makes “The Nice Guys” so fascinating, and fun, is that Black treats this densely structured story like a hyper-violent screwball comedy.
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March and Healy are better detectives than the Dude, at least, and another part of the charm is seeing how these apparent screwups are underestimated at every turn. The handsome Bomer usually plays the lead male, a good guy. But even a louse like March feels guilty about his latest customer: a granny looking for her granddaughter, who’s lost in more ways than one. He passes out and wakes up next to a corpse whose face has an ugly bloody mess where its right side used to be.
So Gosling – bless him forever – does a Lou Costello fear-stricken asthma take.
In other words, the characters are the story, not what passes for a plot.
From the very first shot – rising over the back of a tattered, pre-restoration Hollywood sign to reveal the L.A. sprawl below while the bass from the Temptations’ Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone bumps in the background – The Nice Guys tells viewers all they need to know about the world in which they’re going to be submerged.
That’s too bad because otherwise I had a good time with these two hapless dicks, and the screenplay by Black and Anthony Bagarozzi is not bad. For Marvel fans, Black also wrote and directed “Iron Man 3”. But the equation’s the same, and like a buddy-cop movie (or a porn film – more on that later) the important thing isn’t the plot.
The Nice Guys isn’t a spoof, like something that might have starred Will Ferrell. It’s also full of nasty bits that are amusing but unpleasant. “I’m not in the Yellow Pages”. But he’s the guy to call, for instance, if your underage daughter is running around with an older guy tempting her with his weed. That’s an encounter the Untitled One will ensure doesn’t happen again. He delivers his messages with fists, guns, bats … pretty much anything available and he leaves behind bruises, broken bones, split lips and concussions. Throw in, oh, a 1970s setting, a dead porn star, a daughter for the Gosling character who is Wise Beyond Her Years (as almost all little girls in movies are required to be), and a lot of gratuitous gun violence! For some reason, she’s naked in the auto at the time. She’s ends up being their ringer, the true detective among all the chaos. Holland March (Gosling) is a down-on-his-luck private eye screw-up with a drinking problem and a 13-year-old daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice, a natural-born scene stealer). And for a film featuring a porn star as a major character, there’s remarkably little to worry about on that front. Confidential character. He’s paired with Ryan Gosling’s shrill, alcoholic PI, whose Buster Keaton-esque clumsiness adds “physical comedy” to the résumé of one of our generation’s biggest powerhouses. Your life becomes better than you ever thought it could be. I saw 15 minutes of the movie with an audience and they said they laughed a lot but were surprised to find themselves emotionally invested as well.
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It’s not our fault if Gibson later found ways to humiliate himself without anyone laughing. Showing comic chops that belie his fuckhead reputation, Russell Crowe is hilarious as a broad-bodied bruiser hired to pummel child molesters and rapists, like a low-rent version of his L.A. And yet it’s most decidedly an underdog, sliding into theaters between Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse, its busted-out protagonists a long, long way from spandex-land.
