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...

Presence -- A Review

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...

Cleaner -- a review

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog