The Nice Guys

 The Nice Guys is an unpretentious buddy picture starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe.  Released in 2016, the movie apparently sunk like a stone and made no lasting impression on anyone.  The film is reasonably entertaining and a pleasant diversion, but not much more.  The two principal players are appealing in a low-energy way and this is one of the few movies that I have seen in which I'm able to tolerate Ryan Gosling, an actor that I ordinarily detest.  

Set in 1977, the film follows the exploits of two private investigators, the effective, if brutish, Healy (Russell Crowe) and the comically inept March (Ryan Gosling).  After an initial confrontation in which Healy efficiently beats up March and, then, gratuitously breaks his arm, the rival gumshoes join forces to search for a missing girl.  The girl, Amelia, is involved in the porno industry and, now, on the lam from a cabal of assassins who are trying to kill her.  As it happens, all the participants in a porno film that has now gone missing are being systematically eliminated, perhaps, because of the content of the movie.  The plot is complicated but, ultimately, makes sense and there are some very amusing twists and turns to the story.  March is so feckless that he discovers important clues by literally falling on them.  In one case, March tries to impress a girl at a party and drops off a balcony falling about two-hundred feet down a hill where he comes to rest next to a bloody decomposing corpse.  March does variations on old Three Stooges or Bud Costello double-takes when he sees the gruesome body, a schtick that will amuse some viewers and disgust others (I sort of like the Three Stooges  and Abbot and Costello and so I admired Gosling's audacity in imitating them.)  There are a couple exciting shootouts in which March drops his gun and or can't get it loaded, while the omnicompetent Healy blazes away at the bad guys.  Kim Basinger appears as the ultimate bad mother -- she's taken out a contract on her rebellious daughter Amelia, and, such is the temper of the times, that she's the boss of the Department of Justice, of course, corrupt and in league with the villains.  (The bad guys are Detroit auto-makers trying to foist pollution-causing catalytic converters on the public in spite of anti-smog demonstrations in LA where the film is ostensibly set -- it was actually shot mostly in Georgia.) The film's MacGuffin is the reel of porno film that contains an expose of the villainy of the Detroit auto makers and, at the climax, the round tin containing the film rolls around merrily while all sorts of mayhem occurs in its wake.  The film amusingly re-creates the hair styles and garish clothes of the late seventies and there's a nostalgia-inducing soundtrack.  The movie's biggest misstep is that the action relies upon a 13 year-old girl, March's daughter, to keep her incompetent father on-task and to solve important aspects of the crime.  Since the milieu of the film is the ultra-corrupt adult film industry, there's something a bit distasteful about the young girl's involvement in the plot.  Mores evolve quickly and what was tolerable when the script was written (2002) and, even, marginally acceptable in 2016 when the film was released, is probably not suitable for mass-market consumption today in late 2022.

I thought the movie was fun, a nice diversion, and completely trivial.  It's directed by Shane Black, a Hollywood yeoman-director, who can generally be counted on to deliver a movie inside budget and with enough flair to break even on ticket receipts.  A few of his pictures, for instance, Iron Man, have been huge box-office successes.  You don't know his name because his accomplishment is to anonymously make films that are entertaining using a largely invisible and generic style -- the director is like Howard Hawks:  he doesn't draw attention to himself.