“We’re in such ridiculous situations in this movie, and it’s so much fun, it’s so silly, that I knew it would work because I know that Russell, he doesn’t really do anything that doesn’t work”.
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Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a tough guy who beats up people for money.
Director Shane Black (Iron Man 3, Lethal Weapon) says he purposefully cast two actors with Odd Couple-esque chemistry.
Mr. Gosling is Holland March, a private investigator who’s not always on the up-and-up, not always good at his job, not always sober and usually not as smart as he thinks he is (such as when he’s making Hitler analogies). However, new information sends them both on the hunt for Amelia and down a rabbit hole that involves Detroit automakers, pornography, and the Department of Justice. “Plus being part of a Shane Black film, you knew that all the old approaches to an action comedy would be thrown out the window”.
How would you describe your character? The film is due to be released in the United Kingdom on June 3.
But where Black has a real treasure is with his two lead actors.
And yet, there are Gosling and Crowe, basically just crushing it. Crowe plays the flawless deadpan to Gosling’s cartoonish Holland. I wish we could shoot here more because we end up having to try and capture that somewhere else.
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Gosling proves himself to be an adept physical comedian, subjecting himself to all manner of humiliations and abjection, falling down hills, getting caught in the john with his trousers down, but always maintaining an air of leisure-suited finesse. While Black could have made another ode to machismo and framed Holland and Jackson as the pinnacles of morality, he cleverly subverts our expectations and plays up their buffoonery while the young girl gets to be the moral center of the picture. Luckily, his latest work, The Nice Guys, serves up more of this same formula that has worked so well for him in the past. The handsome Bomer usually plays the lead male, a good guy. Someone deserves a casting Oscar for figuring out they’d be just as flawless as mismatched, comic-action rivals-turned-buddies who beat and riff on one another first, then do likewise to the villains (including Carnegie Mellon University graduate Matt Bomer) they team against as the twists grow more tangled. It’s an absolute joy watching Crowe and Gosling bounce off each other and fling Black’s sparkling dialogue. Written by Black and Anthony Bagarozzi (with a nod to Black’s favorite pulp novelist, Brett Halliday), “The Nice Guys” isn’t the flashy muscle auto it wants to be, but it speeds along well enough. It’s a total delight.
