Warner Bros.
Shane Black scored the biggest hit of his directorial career with 2013’s Iron Man 3, a film that was controversial to die-hard comic fans but won general audiences to the tune of a 1.2 billion dollar gross.
That kind of bank usually nets you a lot of freedom on your next film, and the result is The Nice Guys, a period-piece action-mystery starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as mismatched partners working their way through the Los Angeles underworld.
Shane Black has always combined the form and structure of the classic LA private eye novel with the sensibilities and spectacle of big budget Hollywood action films.
Like Tarantino, he’s made a career out of finding a strange cinematic poetry between the terse lines of prose of a hard boiled mystery novel.
At times, he leans more on the kinetic action (The Long Kiss Goodnight, Iron Man 3) and at times the pulp influence is much stronger (The Last Boy Scout, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) but there’s always going to be the same mix of unexpected wit and obligatory explosions.
The Nice Guys, buoyed by the aforementioned creative freedom, sees Shane lean the hardest he ever has into his literary influences. There’s no big action set piece until about an hour in; Crowe and Gosling play characters steeped in detective cliche; and Black feels comfortable delivering a plot that actually would fit right in next to a John D. MacDonald novel with all the requisite red herrings and shady characters.
So why does this film, as opposed to the rest of Black’s work, feel so tired out?
Set in 1977, Gosling plays Holland March, an unscrupulous PI hired by a rich widow to find her niece, a porn star going by the name of Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio). March’s investigation has turned up a friend of Misty’s, Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who may have information on her whereabouts. Amelia, in turn, hires Jackson Healy (Crowe) to get March off her back. Healy is a legbreaker with a heart of gold who dreams of being a PI like the guys he read about as a kid.
Healy tunes up March as promised, but when a pair of killers turn up at his place afterwards looking for Amelia, Healy recognizes he’s in over his head and turns to the private eye he just laid a beating on to help him make heads or tails of what’s going on. Healy and March find the financier of Misty’s film company dead at a swanky porn party in the Hollywood hills, and are picked up by Amelia’s mother Judith Kittner (Kim Basinger), a Justice Department middle manager, is trying to cover up her involvement in political corruption related to, of all things, catalytic converters.
The Nice Guys shows some fatigue with the Shane Black formula.
Visually it lacks a lot of the style and punch of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and that lack of visual energy is mirrored in Russell Crowe’s performance where he seems to be trying to get as far as possible with just a twinkle in his eye.
Gosling is more energetic but I feel like his character really embodies the central problem with the film at a conceptual level: the balance of humor and menace is way off and it never finds the same tonal consistency that earlier Black films managed.
Whereas Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer would find hilarious observations and interludes in working through their action film beats, Gosling just plays March as silly and amateurish. The film gets a lot of mileage about how “bad” these characters are and how unlike most Hollywood heroes they seem, and on paper, a legbreaker and a con man PI would be fun leads for a romp but the actual film feels toothless and unfocused.
I feel like The Nice Guys was created in a deliberate attempt to subvert some of the tropes of this style: attractive blonde main villain; Healy killing a defenseless antagonist; March’s daughter played as a lot meaner than most child stars (a trick taken directly from Last Boy Scout) but the energy never comes together with the right urgency and so elements like the EPA plot, which could have been clever on the page just make the film feel like it doesn’t have any bite to go with its bark.
Extras includes featurettes.
Recommended, with reservations.
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