“The Nice Guys” might be set in the ’70s, but it really feels like it is from the ’80s. A welcome palate cleanser during a summer movie season dominated by superheroes, sequels and spin-offs, “The Nice Guys” is a highly competent throwback to the days when all you needed for a blockbuster was two mismatched leads, several snappy one-liners and a few cool shootouts. (Which makes complete sense, as the film’s writer and director Shane Black got started in 1987 with his superb script for “Lethal Weapon.”)
This time around, the squabbling, crime-fighting partners are Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) and Holland March (Ryan Gosling). Healy is an aging private enforcer with a deeply buried conscious that’s just starting to resurface. March is a private detective that spends more time scamming his clients than actually investigating. He’s a guy whose failures and sense of failure have launched him into a destructive spiral. Yet Gosling brings real life to this deadbeat, showcasing a hilarious manic energy during the few moments when March believes he has done something right. If nothing else, this film establishes that Gosling has evolved into one of Hollywood’s most talented physical comedians.
And even though she has received far less promotional attention, March’s daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) deserves to be considered a third lead in her own right. Director Black has always been uniquely gifted at writing for child actors – perhaps because he pushes past anything cloying or precocious to write children that are believably flawed. (One of the film’s most amusing moments involves a 12-year-old bragging about his experiences on a porn set). And with an actress of Rice’s caliber, Black really seems to be upping his game. Holly isn’t just a child that keeps tagging along with her father and getting into misadventures, she’s basically the brains of the entire operation. That’s a testament to how inept Healy and March are, but it’s also a testament to Black’s keen understanding that children can be far better at manipulating people than any adult.
Once the characters have been established, Black sends them on a knotty missing-person case which takes them from the lows of the 1970s porn industry to the highs of the 1970s automotive industry, with a quick stop through the hippie movement. It’s a cunningly plotted mystery, where no detail is too small to not cleverly fold back into the third act. Even if “The Nice Guys” ultimately doesn’t have much to say about the worlds it’s investigating beyond “Man, some crazy shit happened in the ’70s,” it’s still a joy to watch Healy and March bumble their way through an archetypical noir plot.
But even though the film humorously refuses to take itself – or its main characters – seriously, I wouldn’t necessarily call it light. “Lethal Weapon” started with a character considering suicide, and it seems like it wouldn’t take much to nudge either Healy or March in that direction. Many modern blockbuster films feature characters that are either in their ’20s or act like they are in their ’20s. Not so with this film. Age matters for both Healy and March. They are two characters past their prime, not that their prime was probably even that good to start. They’re now being forced to grapple with the weight of their failures. Beyond finding a missing person or taking down a vast criminal conspiracy, the motive that really drives Healy and March is one of legacy. They have both reached the point where it is too late for them to fully turn their lives around, but not too late for them help leave a better world for the next generation.
“The Nice Guys” probably isn’t going to restore anyone’s faith in cinema. And no one is ever going to call it a modern masterpiece, or for that matter even a subversive modern masterpiece that hides its brilliance behind cleverly constructed genre filmmaking. But that doesn’t mean the film can’t be impishly smart or remarkably funny. And in my opinion, it is probably the most purely entertaining film I have seen (will see?) this summer.
Contact Raymond Maspons at [email protected].