The Nice Guys (2016)

Between the mismatched pair of investigators, the convoluted criminal conspiracy, the steadily-rising death toll, and the LA setting, it’s obvious that Shane Black is repeating himself with The Nice Guys, and his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a hard act to follow. But with an upgraded central pair of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, and an even more quip-heavy script, Black pulls it off – and then some.

Holland March (Gosling) is a private investigator ripping off old ladies to make the rent on his ostentatious palm-fronted house. Jackson Healy (Crowe) is an enforcer who beats people up for a fee – bad people, usually, like a 70s version of pre-superpowers Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool. They collide when March goes looking for the wrong girl – Amelia – who hires Healy to break his arm and warn him off. After couple of semi-competent henchmen pressure Healy to give up Amelia’s location, he teams up with a very reluctant March to figure out what’s going on, and why everyone around Amelia keeps dying.  

While the plot lacks the elegance and the final emotional gut-punch of Kiss Kiss, the film more than makes up for that with sheer entertainment. Crowe and Gosling are an even more delightful comic pair than Downey and Kilmer, because while the latter two had a largely-stable dynamic of Downey being a bumbling idiot and Kilmer insulting him, Crowe and Gosling take turns to be the smart one. Gosling’s alcoholic private eye Holland March is likeable in spite of himself – underneath his cowardice and basic lack of morals, there’s a sort of scrappy underdog cleverness which resembles the famous fictional private eyes of old, and his honest terror at the chaos around him adds an audience-surrogate aspect to his charms. Crowe is largely relegated to playing the straight man as the bemused enforcer Jackson Healy, but March is so vibrant as a character that Healy doesn’t need to do more than stare in disbelief at his screw-ups to get a laugh.

The Nice Guys has a hilariously wacky plot featuring a porn film that’s secretly an environmental expose about car pollution, and auto manufacturers trying to suppress it, but it never quite comes together into a sensible, coherent whole. The villains are similarly unengaging – they either follow in the tradition of Iron Man 3’s amusingly self-aware henchmen or play stone-faced killing machines. The most enjoyment to be had out of them is either watching their incredulity when our heroes – for want of a better word – keep making fools of themselves.

Nevertheless, the opulent excesses of 70s porn mogul’s mansions and five star hotels being recreated in full, the joke-a-minute pace of the script, the unusual amount of slapstick and inventive physical comedy, and incredibly weird – but hilarious – divergences involving a giant fly and Richard Nixon, all signal that Shane Black had the time of his life directing this film. His enthusiasm is contagious. 

And while the film’s delights are mostly on the surface, Angourie Rice as March’s precocious 13-year-old daughter Holly is the film’s emotional center, in a superb performance. At one point, March asks her: “Give it to me straight. Am I a bad person?” and she agrees with zero hesitation. Their dynamic is almost one of equals, with Holly more a sort of long-suffering little sister than a daughter. At one point, fed up with March’s apathy and alcoholism, she explodes at him, and you can’t help but wince at her cuttingly honest anger and disappointment. If the film has any emotional arc, it’s about Holland learning to live up to his daughter’s expectations. That might be clichéd, but like everything else about The Nice Guys, all you have to do is put the right actors in and give them a good enough script - and it works great. It might the most entertaining film of the year so far.