I thoroughly enjoy this strange sub-genre of private detective movies that are either set in the 1970s or feel like they are. Whether it’s the neo-noir of TOO LATE (which isn’t set in the ’70s, but it sure as hell wants to feel like it is), or the trippy, psychedelics of INHERENT VICE, which is more of a death knell to the 1960s, but it is set in 1970, these films offer us a look at damaged men who are used and abused in equal measure by their clients and those that mean their clients harm. But writer-director Shane Black’s THE NICE GUYS is the garage band version of this tale—rough and ragged around the edges, it doesn’t even care if it gets all of its ’70s pop culture references exactly right, let alone its sweeping, confusing and sometimes pointless plot elements.
Set only seven years after INHERENT VICE, although it might as well be several decades later, THE NICE GUYS has moved on from hippies and gone head first into a corrupt and sleazy world, squarely on the periphery of the booming porn industry of Los Angeles. A porn star is dead of an apparent suicide, and a relative believes she saw the girl after she supposedly expired, so she hires private dick Holland March (Ryan Gosling), who is effectively raising his loving teenage daughter, Holland (Angourie Rice), by himself. I love Gosling in full-on conniving mode—fast talking, always lying, but usually with his heart in the right place. He’s actually making decent living as a PI, but that’s because he has no qualms about overcharging or extending the time he spends on an easy case by several days.
His path to figuring out exactly what the older relative saw leads him to Amelia (Margaret Qualley), a woman who looks a bit like the dead porn star and seems dangerously tied up with the wrong kind of people. It just so happens that she’s also related to a higher-up politician (Kim Basinger), who desperately wants her daughter found. At some point, March realizes that he and a local fixer/private eye Jackson Healey (Russell Crowe) are after the same girl, and while the two aren’t the most obvious partners, they manage to give a close approximation.
Again, the specifics of THE NICE GUYS don’t really matter much. I’m fairly certain the details of the plot hold together—and involve everything from the porn industry to air pollution to conspiracy theories about the Big Three automakers (at the time). The story is essentially an excuse to let these two clowns cut loose, do a lot of damage, verbally assault each other’s manhood, and physically assault just about everything else. If you can handle a bit of gruesomeness and child endangerment for a spell, I’m guessing you’re going to flip for this movie.
The film lacks a character that makes it easy to enter the story or identify with in any way, thus allowing us to care what actually happens to these people, but strangely that didn’t bother me as much as it often does in movies. Adding a little fire and zip to the proceedings are bad guys played by the likes of Matt Bomer (a psycho killer named John Boy, because he has a mole on his face), Keith David, and Beau Knapp as Blueface, a name given to him when the dye pack in a stolen bag of money explodes in his face. Ultimately everyone is racing to find a very special adult movie, which was the last to star the dead porn actress and the almost massacre proportions of the final shootout sequence.
As a writer and director, Shane Black (who co-wrote this film with Anthony Bagarozzi) has simply always known how to do this, since his earliest screenplays for the LETHAL WEAPON films to THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, KISS KISS BANG BANG, and IRON MAN 3. He adores the damaged-goods action hero and has created two for The Nice Guys, who seem to complete each other in a spiritual way. The resulting dialogue is raunchy, even offensive at times, but it had me howling while I was watching it. In what has become Black’s classic move, he subverts our expectations of what an action movie is, what a buddy-cop film (a genre he practically invented) has been for decades, and made the smartest and most competent character in this film a teen girl.
Crowe and Gosling are perfectly paired, and I truly hope Black finds a way to team these two up together again in the near future, preferably as these characters. This is a film that rejects the idea of being polished and tidy, and I love it all the more for it. This is some of the best work we’ve seen from the people who made THE NICE GUYS, in front of and behind the cameras, and here’s hoping the trend continues.
