The Nice Guys (2016)

After two Iron Man films, Jon Favreau retired to a more personal film with Chef, which seems to have rejuvenated his creative batteries while remaining an entertaining movie in its own right. Likewise, three years after Iron Man 3 it’s Shane Black’s turn to scale back for a smaller film – misplaced, perhaps, in the summer blockbuster season (I can’t help thinking it’d have performed better financially in, say, October), but right up there with Hail, Caesar! in terms of laughs per minute.

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling star as errant private eyes whose paths cross on a missing persons case before the case turns into an apparent murder (or, as it turns out, murders) reaching as high as the head of the Department of Justice (Kim Basinger). It’s a 1970s extravaganza, from the music and locations to the politics and pornography; hat-tip to Angourie Rice as Gosling’s daughter, overeager and spirited despite her father’s protestations.

I’ve been a fan of Shane Black’s going as far back as my first viewing of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and his clever screenplay on The Monster Squad. Of course, the former had a lot to do with Robert Downey Jr. in a starring role, but that has a lot to do with the fact that RDJ is naturally adept at delivering the kind of lines that Black writers – quick-witted, dryly sarcastic, and unapologetically buffoonish when need be. Throw in the buddy cop element (lest we forget, Black screenwrote Lethal Weapon), and you’re well on your way to The Nice Guys.

Another way to put it would be to think of The Nice Guys as “Thomas Pynchon’s Big Lebowski,” juxtaposing the neo-noir aesthetics of the Coen Brothers with Pynchon’s penchant for the absurd, Inherent Vice if it starred a pair of detectives. Yet for all the twists and turns that analogy might lead you to expect, The Nice Guys is never less than straightforward, its mystery meandering but never straying while wrinkling in a nice bit of ambiguity just because the final reel (in brief, is someone lying about the truth of the case?).

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a success because of the unlikely chemistry between the extreme personalities of RDJ and Val Kilmer (the latter in an uproarious turn as Gay Perry), and The Nice Guys continues that pattern by joining Crowe and Gosling in a successful combination of thuggish straight man Crowe and waggish clown Gosling. While Crowe gets in his fair share of punchlines and confident one-liners, it’s Gosling who runs away with the film’s funniest moments (some playing off his daughter, in an entry for “World’s Nuttiest Approach to Parenting”).

Unfortunately, it seems that The Nice Guys is flying under the commercial radar, though critically it’s hovering around 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps The Nice Guys will find its audience on DVD, and hopefully so because this is a film that is a guaranteed bad-mood-killer. Hail, Caesar! gave me an unending grin on my face, but The Nice Guys goes for the comedic jugular and left me wheezing with laughter throughout much of the picture.

The Nice Guys is rated R for “violence, sexuality, nudity, language and brief drug use.” Definitely a hard R between the violence (gunfights, fistfights, people getting hit with cars and falling off buildings), profanity (F-bombs aplenty), and nudity (topless and nude women in the opening scene and in an extended party scene).