Shane Black finds new inspiration in his own personal obsessions for “The Nice Guys,” a comedic thriller starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as a mismatched pair of private eyes led by a missing-persons case into a far bigger mystery than they are prepared to face. Since 1987’s “Lethal Weapon,” Black has brought together troubled tough-guy pairs, using the violent dynamics of stories like “The Last Boy Scout,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight” (with Geena Davis taking one tough-guy role) and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” as cover for pressure-cooker character studies. “The Nice Guys,” which the screenwriter also directed, is the best of Black’s films. It is eccentrically, sometimes broadly funny, with top-notch performances from Crowe and Gosling and a pitch-perfect sense of timing to help smooth over some of the script’s fault lines and blind spots.
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Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, struggling to raise his teen daughter as he balances investigative work and heavy drinking. Wracked with guilt over the death of his wife, March’s standards have slipped but his instincts are good enough to keep him just barely above water. Russell Crowe is brass-knuckle enforcer Jackson Healy, a bully-for-hire who’ll politely knock on your door before knocking you out. His punches are followed by warnings like “stay away from little girls.” Not exactly Superman, but not quite a monster, either.
More so than “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” this new film is cut very much from the “Big Lebowski” mold in that the entire plot is basically a MacGuffin. The film’s great pleasures are not rooted in the twisty mystery story, which features a dead porn star, a teen boy who boasts about the size of his junk, and a coalition of auto manufacturers, but in the interplay between Crowe and Gosling, their repartee laced with gags, odd reversals, and sharp wordplay.
Crowe is perfect as the straight man around whom Gosling spins like a rocket on a string. As March, Gosling veers between cool and capable (often fronting for his lack of self-determination) and a frantic, shrieking state of near-breakdown. As far out on a limb as the troubled P.I. goes — and he eventually goes literally over the edge — Gosling is always in complete control. He mugs, not egregiously, and does a great Lou Costello impersonation. Gosling’s command of oddly rhythmic verbal tics and big physical comedy are welcome callbacks to the sort of old Hollywood one imagines Shane Black must love.
It’s easier to pay attention to Gosling’s pyrotechnics, especially when the film’s third act rolls through an almost Rube Goldberg-esque sequence of comedy/action scenarios as the characters scramble after a reel of film, but Crowe is doing equally good work in a quieter mode. He’s imposing and brutal, with a surprisingly acute moral sensibility he fine-tunes as events push him closer to March.
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Set in 1977 Hollywood, “The Nice Guys” cruises through Black’s own signature Los Angeles, a pastiche informed by pulp novels, old movies, true stories of corruption and, presumably, his own career successes and disappointments. This is a smog-choked LA with a dilapidated Hollywood sign, an influx of pornography, and that classic imbalance of power between The Man and everyone else. March and Healy are “everyone else” by default, though they are not exactly part of the already stale hippie generation. They look askance at student protests and sexually aware high-schoolers, not that their own dissolute professions offer moral guidance to anyone.
Together, however, as they untangle the knotted threads of the plot concocted by Black and co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi, March and Healy become a bizarre two-man support group. There’s all the bickering and fighting that one expects in a film from Shane Black, but together with March’s daughter Holly, played by talented newcomer Angourie Rice, the odd couple forms a skewed nuclear family, with Holly and Healy as caregivers and Gosling’s March as the precocious, headstrong child. Black’s characters are often held back not by some elitist gatekeeper, but by their own failings, and these two are no different. With Gosling and Crowe in the roles, watching their minor evolution is a delight.
Black’s direction may have benefitted from working with the Marvel machine on “Iron Man 3.” He’s more in control of staging and timing than demonstrated in his debut “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Jokes aren’t lost in this movie; there’s just the question of which one takes priority in any given moment as Black and Bagarozzi layer numerous comic setups, often woven with action or dramatic beats, into each scene. The film really is a thriller with comic overtones, but the comedy is pitched so far forward that some supporting actors seem just on the verge of becoming comically self-aware. That never quite happens, but more than once there’s the sense an actor is just about to break.
The action is anarchic, at times gleefully so. Black and Bagarozzi toy with setups and payoffs that feel new despite the familiar thriller context. An almost-out-of-place dream sequence leads into an almost surreal comic payoff involving the blurred line between dream and reality. Elsewhere, a stray bullet during one gunfight takes out a total innocent in a different building. Timing and staging register the moment as bizarre black comedy, and that’s part of the ethos behind Black’s vision: Sometimes the only thing you can do is bark a shocked laugh and then move on.
This 1977 Los Angeles is just enough of a cultural dinosaur to feel unusual; at times Black navigates a very thin line between creating characters who are regressively out-of-step with modern attitudes (or appropriately out-of-step, given the period setting) and espousing those ideas himself. A high-school educational film featuring a gay joke tells us we’re deep in the unwoke ’70s. The Los Angeles we see is nearly monocultural, and Black’s own embrace of classic tough-guy characters might be mistaken for a desire to live in the era. But there’s no question that this Los Angeles, with its grime, violence, and slide into depravity, is a bad place to be.
The biggest jerks and buffoons in “The Nice Guys,” however, tend to be March and Healy themselves, with March’s daughter Holly guiding each man’s moral development. This isn’t anything close to a message movie; it’s more like a framework for everything in Black’s bag of tricks.
If nothing else, this third directorial effort from Black would earn good marks simply for coming up with a handful of fresh comic action concepts in a genre that often seems stale. That it also creates a set of superbly well-drawn characters, brought to life by Gosling, Crowe, and Rice, sets “The Nice Guys” apart not only from typical summer fare, but from other thrillers and action movies as a whole. There’s little else quite like this fast-paced, deeply funny mystery — except Shane Black’s other films. This is his high-water mark as a director, and a feast for audiences ready to take a ride deep into genre-blending territory with two schmucks just trying to make a (mostly) honest living. [A-]
