Shane Black / 2016 / USA / 116 mins
1977, Los Angeles, and two morally questionable men are on the trail of a mystery riddled with sex, murder and conspiracy. Ever alternating between capable and culpable, it’s unlikely that enforcer Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) and Private Investigator Holland March (Ryan Gosling) would be anybody’s first picks for the case – hell, they’re not even each other’s. But when assassins played by likes of Keith David and Matt Bomer want you dead, well, things tend to get out of hand.
A darkly comic neo-noir about reluctant partners thrown into the underbelly of the Hollywood party scene, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is about as close a successor to his 2005 outing, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, as you’re likely to find. Moreover, despite being co-written by Anthony Bagarozzi, it’s also the most independently driven Black film since then, with only his work on Iron Man 3 bridging the gap. Such is the strength of Black’s authorial voice, however, that even under the control of the Marvel juggernaut, his signature was keenly felt.
From Lethal Weapon on, Black’s love of forced pairings in volatile situations has been well-established, the resulting blend of action and comedy also allowing the director to sneak in a welcome dose of heart (no wonder his films almost always take place at Christmas). The Nice Guys is no exception. Black and Bagarozzi’s consistently entertaining script ranges from the endearingly daft (March’s enthusiastic championing of both Godwin’s Law and Healy’s ‘sweet ankle gun’) to the outright surreal (Richard Nixon: beacon of death), but what really sells the package is the humanity of its delivery.
Even in a film chockfull of silliness and savagery (The Nice Guys also carries on Black’s tradition of the amusingly brutalised lead, Gosling’s arm taking a role previously filled by Robert Downey Jr.’s dislodged digit), sometimes silence can say everything, with both Gosling and Crowe exceling at the unspoken reaction shot. Meanwhile, with two damaged men steering the ship, it falls upon March’s teenage daughter – the best detective of the three – to provide the moral compass, with a revelatory turn by Angourie Rice walking that fine line of precociousness and charm.
Any disappointments with The Nice Guys probably lie at story level, with the nefarious plot driving events proving both overly convoluted and surprisingly inconsequential. Perhaps though, in the tradition of the genre, this is unimportant. Legend has it that whilst adapting Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, filmmakers came to realise they had no idea how or why one victim got killed and asked the author to the settle the mystery. His answer? ‘Damned if I know.’ Like Chandler, Black knows that, in noir, it’s not the play that people remember, it’s the players – and if there’s one thing these nice guys aren’t, it’s forgettable.