The Nice Guys (2016)

The Nice Guys is a 2016 action comedy directed by Shane Black and starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling.

No one does action comedy like Shane Black. There’s a bit in The Nice Guys where one half of the ‘buddy cop’ duo, Holland March (Ryan Gosling) dreams that his partner Jack Healy (Russell Crowe) wears an ankle holster. Later, when confronted at gunpoint by one of the film’s villains, he frantically collapses at Crowe’s feet and begins pawing at his ankle looking for it. It’s a hilarious moment in a hilariously off-beat film and a typical example of the brilliance of writer/director Shane Black’s work – he’s fantastic at follow-through.

Another equally great example is a supposedly heart-wrenching moment where Crowe confides in Gosling about an incident that occurred in his past, but Gosling (a rabid drunk) falls asleep before Crowe can finish the story. Later when Crowe brings it up, expecting some understanding, he’s met with a blank-faced stare from Gosling who has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s a beautiful moment from both actors.

There are so many great moments throughout the film, but some of my favourites are where Shane Black, who has been in the action movie business for so long (he wrote Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout and wrote and directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) mercilessly pokes fun at the tropes of the genre. Like when head villain Kim Basinger shows up out of the blue and announces very seriously that she’s ‘head of the Justice Department’, Gosling just shrugs and says ‘well that explains basically nothing’. The film doesn’t take itself seriously for a second.

Crowe plays a tough guy who beats people up for money, and Gosling an alcoholic private detective. Their paths cross when Gosling is hired to find a missing girl and Crowe is hired by the missing girl to stop Gosling looking for her.

Gosling’s wife died leaving him with a daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice). March is hired to find an adult film star we see in the film's opening scene as a kid steals a porn mag from under his Dad’s bed and gazes lovingly at the centerfold, Misty Mountains. Just then, a car crashes through his house and the kid stumbles out to find Misty herself in the same pose she was in the centerfold, but she’s dead. I love that the kid takes his shirt off and covers her up. Black establishes early on that ‘nice guys’ do the best they can in a shitty world. It’s typical of Black’s wonderfully dark sense of humour that the kid covers the body he was leering at in a magazine minutes earlier.

Anyway, when Crowe and Gosling realise the plot is thicker than they originally thought and that something very strange is going on with the dead porn star and all the people involved with the production of her latest film, March and Healy team up ala Riggs and Murtaugh and the film jumps from one oddball situation to another, made all the workable by the great chemistry between the two leads and Black’s directorial competence. Having grown up watching earlier examples of his work, I found myself nodding in appreciation at his restraint here. There’s no flashy camera work, no over-the-top special effects. The action is coherent and easy to follow, which puts him a cut above most other directors working in the genre today. He's over the top where it works, and underplays it where it matters.

The Nice Guys takes place post-Kennedy - poverty and corruption are rampant, the Hollywood sign is decaying and LA is kept afloat by two things - porn and the auto industry. I love the parallels Black draws between the two. There are two party sequences bookending the main storyline – one set at a porno producer’s mansion and the other at an auto show. They are both virtually identical.

I also love some of the commentary on adults looking down on the ‘kids of today’. Set in 1977, there’s a sequence at the start where Crowe laments that things have gotten so bad that a 13 year-old girl would shack up with a sleazy guy because he provides her with pot. Huh, give it a few years buddy. There’s another hilarious example of this sentiment later when Gosling encounters a kid who can’t stop talking about porn and how he tried to get into a film because he’s got a big dick. I love the follow-through here as well – Gosling hilariously obsesses over the kid’s vulgarity because he thinks that’s the type of guy his daughter has to ‘look forward to’.

The humour in the film is spot-on, and the smaller stuff is just as well-executed as the bigger jokes. Early in the film Crowe breaks Gosling’s arm when he’s threatening him to stop looking for the girl. I love that throughout the film we see Gosling in several different outfits, and rather than change his wardrobe he just cuts the arms of his expensive suits to allow for his cast. It’s great physical comedy and another insight into the character – he’s rented a house right across the street from his one that burned down – this is a guy desperately clinging to the life he wants rather than living the life he has.

Lethal Weapon kicked off the sub-genre of the ‘buddy cop’ film: fast-paced movies that effortlessly combine action, slapstick humour and (often very dark) comedy.  From the fantastically choreographed final set piece to a character forgetting his brass knuckles the same way someone might forget their car keys, Shane Black was doing this stuff long before the phrase ‘Tarantino-esque’ made an appearance, and in my humble opinion, no one has ever done it better.