Russell Crowe (left) and Ryan Gosling play unexpected allies.
Shane Black is that rare oddball who’s made a successful decades-long career out of zigging when every script note says you should zag. In 1993, he co-wrote the screenplay for The Last Action Hero, a blockbuster action movie that made fun of the conventions in blockbuster action movies. He packed his hilarious buddy-detective thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with tidbits like a frustrated attempt to preserve a severed finger. Even Black’s foray into the carefully controlled Marvel universe in Iron Man 3 kept the superhero in street clothes for much of the movie, upending the idea of the super-villain. A new Shane Black movie offers the giddy-making prospect of something that can catch you completely off guard.
The Nice Guys returns to that buddy-detective-thriller milieu he’s been working ever since his very first produced script, for the original Lethal Weapon. In 1977 Los Angeles, private detective Holland March (Ryan Gosling) is searching for a missing girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley); she’s hired tough guy Jackson Healey (Russell Crowe) to make sure that people who are searching for her don’t find her.
Black revels in the grunginess of his 1970s period setting. He makes maximum use of a delightful soundtrack packed with funk and disco classics, but he’s more interested in a specifically Southern Californian world of seedy porn theaters, over-the-top Hollywood parties, gas station lines and an omnipresent blanket of brown smog. Throw in a plot based on a very particular kind of conspiracy, and you’ve got something as specific in its 1970s-by-way-of-2010s California as Chinatown was in its 1930s-by-way-of-1970s California.
But The Nice Guys is pure comedy — and that comedy is almost always built on something coming at you from out of left field. Black is brilliant at using the backgrounds, edges and light-revealed darkness of his frame to catch an audience off-guard with a hilarious bit of business. He undercuts the tough-guy expectations of his plot by making Gosling’s character an often-bumbling scaredy-cat, whether fighting with a bathroom stall door to keep a gun trained on someone or squealing like a girl when danger erupts. It’s a movie full of visual and verbal punch lines too delicious to spoil, because the joy comes from the fact that you just never saw them coming.
