The Nice Guys -- movie review


You want to get out of the car and watch the rest of the movie like a normal person, or what?

Shane Black made his mark early in Hollywood with his script for the first Lethal Weapon, which reinvigorated the action film genre back in the 1980s. Black reinvigorated his own career back in 2005 by writing and directing the superb Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, which starred a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. and a post-Batman Val Kilmer as a pair of unlikely private detectives who work a tough case. Black would work with Downey again as a director on Iron Man 3, and the success of that film enabled him to direct The Nice Guys.

Taking place in the late 1970s, The Nice Guys features a team-up between a private eye named Holland March ( Ryan Gosling) and Jackson Healy, a hired muscle who breaks people’s arms for a living. In fact, that was how March and Healy meet, when Healy breaks March’s arm in an effort to warn him off of a big case. But both men soon reluctantly team up when they realize that they’ve been working the same case from opposite ends. A young woman, involved in the supposed suicide of a famous porn, soon vanishes into thin air with Healy and March hot on her trail in their best fumbling manner.

In much the same way that Black transformed the action film genre with Lethal Weapon by making it a comedy with dramatic overtones, so is The Nice Guys in both style and tone. It’s a comedy that gets its humor from serious situations. The big difference here is the 1970s time period, as well as the addition of a third “partner” to this team up, young Angourie Rice, who plays Holly, March’s precocious daughter who knows the score better than her father does. This Nancy Drew angle could have been very lame, but the great cast of actors, along with a tight script and direction pull it off nicely.

Despite a few pitfalls (Gosling is not very convincing at broad comedy, such as the scene when he encounters a dead body), The Nice Guys works just fine. Unlike Lethal Weapon, or Iron Man 3, it didn’t set the box office on fire, and it’s not as super-charged, nor as exciting as those films--but it wasn’t meant to be. The Nice Guys works very well as a more laid back detective story about a pair of regular guys who were just hustling day by day until they stumbled onto a major conspiracy. I wish The Nice Guys had been successful, because it would have been nice to see these characters again in a sequel. --SF

Comments

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Logan's Run -- a review

I first saw Logan’s Run in a New Jersey movie theater fifty years ago, when I was a boy. The theater, somewhere in the suburban wilds of the Garden State, was packed to the gills with people. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the movie back then—all I cared about that it was a brand new science fiction film, in an age when big budget SF properties on both TV and the big screen was very rare (of course, Star Wars , which would be released the very next year, would change all of that). Based on the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run is a futuristic tale about a man named Logan 5 (Michael York) who has a special job in a place filled with hedonistic leisure. Logan lives within the splendor of a Utopian society whose population dwells within large domes. The interior is presented as a vast, upscale shopping mall where its citizens want for nothing. Every need, every whim, and every fantasy is met. Of course, there’s a catc...

The Housemaid

The Housemaid (from 2025—not to be confused with the 2010 film of the same name) is based on the first book in a psychological thriller series by author Freida McFadden. Sydney Sweeney stars as Millie Calloway. a young woman down on her luck who’s struggling after being released on parole from jail. While living in her car, Millie applies for a live-in maid position with a wealthy family, Nina (Amanda Seyfried) & Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) Winchester, and their young daughter, Cecelia (Indiana Elle) and—to her delight—she gets the job. But, of course, once Millie starts working her maid gig, that’s when the real horror show begins. Despite acting like she was in Millie’s corner in the beginning, Nina deliberately creates problems for Millie that make her look bad. It turns out that Nina is a whack-job who’s served time at a mental facility for trying to kill her own daughter when she was a baby, and now Nina’s got Millie in her sights. If The Housemaid sounds like some ...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog