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

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