The Nice Guys review

Shane Black sets a pair of sound-hearted good-bad guys off on the trail of a missing porn star in a crime caper that’s touched by Anderson, Altman and Hiaasen

Before our emotionally literate, twenty-first century world invented the idea of the “bromance”, we had the buddy comedy: films like California Split, Freebie And The Bean, not to mention Roger Moore and Tony Curtis in The Persuaders on television. Writer-director Shane Black’s horribly enjoyable action comedy The Nice Guys is an jauntily arch return to this tradition, the story of two dishevelled and incompetent private detectives in 1970s Los Angeles — played by Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling — who have been expensively tasked with solving the mystery surrounding the death of a missing porn actress, and what other kind of fascinatingly damaged female character can there be? It’s a comedy hardboiled noir, a plastic Black Dahlia with something of PT Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Altman’s version of Long Goodbye and even some weird touches of Lynch as characters get up from car wrecks to stagger around the highway for a bit. Fans of Carl Hiaasen’s crime novel Skin Tight might also feel that Black has possibly read Hiaasen’s work. As for the possible influence of Polanski’s Chinatown, there’s a father-daughter relationship here, but that’s rather wholesome and heartwarming.

These are wised-up tough guys who fire killer lines as well as their automatics, and action devotee Shane Black absolutely loves for people to be thrown through glass windows (the special fake sugar-glass kind used on movie sets that crumble into a shower of crystal pellets as the body sails through, uninjured); he creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two good old fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along. When our heroes complain about being briefly detained for questioning by a uniformed LA cop, the officer says: “I’m just carrying out my orders”. Black gives us time to guess what acid reply is coming and then Ryan Gosling says: “Yeah, well, you know who else was just following orders? Hitler!” Crowe winces at his partner getting the comeback just that bit wrong.



Crowe plays Jackson Healy, a tough guy who has freelance work beating people up, and is bitter about his recent divorce: “Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate.” Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, an abysmal private detective who gets a regular income accepting commissions from people with dementia at old people’s homes who want him to find their missing spouses — having forgotten about the funeral. One rather lucid old lady hires him to find her niece, a porn star who has famously died in a car crash, but seems plausibly adamant that she is still alive. Meanwhile, Healy is hired by another young woman apparently involved in the porn business to beat up March, but they team up on discovering that they are both being targeted as part of a controversy which goes to the very top, as controversies tend to. They vow to solve the mystery not just for the money, but because it’s the right thing to do and they are basically nice: single-dad March has a precocious smartmouth 13-year-old daughter Holly, played by Angourie Rice, who in a few short years will doubtless be playing a Marvel superheroine.

Black starts his movie with a bravura pre-credit sequence: a cheeky kid sneaks into his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night and steals a porn magazine from underneath their bed and gazes at the centrefold: perhaps wondering what it might be like to meet her in real life, or wondering if some catastrophe or judgement is on the way for the sin of lechery. So it proves.

The wacky mayhem continues from there, cynical and yet somehow more or less sympathetic, with an impressive hit rate of gags and one-liners, with the ambient feelgood factor periodically boosted with party scenes and 70s soundtrack album material. An innocent pleasure.