“The Nice Guys” have the 1970s look but not the feel
The film's most authentic 1970s quality is its sexism
“THE NICE GUYS” is that rare thing: a Hollywood comedy thriller, featuring two A-list stars, which isn’t adapted from a superhero comic, a book, a video game, a television series or a dormant film franchise. It’s difficult to remember the last Friday-night popcorn movie which compares to it, but, whatever it was, it was probably written by Shane Black.
Like everyone else in Hollywood, Mr Black has had a turn at making a superhero blockbuster—2013’s “Iron Man 3”—but he is best known for 1987’s “Lethal Weapon”, which he wrote, and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, which he wrote and directed. In short, he specialises in arch buddy movies in which two mismatched detectives drive around Los Angeles, uncovering sleazy criminal conspiracies, and interrupting their gun battles to trade screwball dialogue. The mismatched detectives in his new film, “The Nice Guys”, have two attributes in common, incompetence and self-loathing. One of them is Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), a jaded divorcee who breaks people’s noses for a living, even though he is now old enough to have a paunch and reading glasses. The other is Holland March (Ryan Gosling, demonstrating a knack for physical comedy and squeaky-voiced panic), a hard-drinking, chain-smoking private eye with a 13-year-old daughter (Angourie Rice) to look after—although it would be more accurate to say that she looks after him.
The two Guys meet when Healy is paid to snap March’s wrist—or, as he helpfully specifies, to give him a “spiral fracture”. But they team up when a porn star named Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio) is reported dead. In the film’s opening scene, her car hurtles down the Hollywood hills, and she is left naked and bleeding, in a ghoulish parody of one of her centrefold poses. But her aunt insists that she saw Misty alive and well two days later. Healy and March investigate in their shambling, haphazard way, and discover sinister links between a canister of film and the Detroit car industry.
Film canister? Detroit? Yes, the main difference between “The Nice Guys” and Mr Black’s previous films is that it is set in 1977—although not, it seems, because Mr Black had any profound insights into the 1970s. The writer-director starts the way he means to go on by putting a funk track over the titles, and he proceeds to tick off the usual 70s signifiers, from elaborate facial hair to brightly coloured suits. It’s more of a themed-dress party than an enlightening examination of the period. And, in general, Mr Black treats his shaggy-dog murder-mystery as a party rather than as a compelling story. He is always happy to push the narrative in a tangential direction, or to stop it altogether, if it means he can stick in another joke or two.
Fair enough. Mr Black is famous for undercutting the seriousness of a scene with his trademark irreverence, and the results are often quite funny. But the constant flippancy can also stop the viewer caring about what happens in the film, as well as sapping its momentum: “The Nice Guys” keeps grinding to a halt, and it badly needs some of Mel Gibson’s manic “Lethal Weapon” energy to get it going again. What’s worse is that the winking, bro-tastic tone can tip over into misogyny. The adult female characters exist to pose in their underwear, before being brutally murdered, to the shrugging indifference of the males. It’s this attitude which is the film’s most authentically 1970s-ish quality.
When there are so few current Hollywood thrillers which forgo capes, masks and computer-generated mayhem in favour of plot, dialogue and gunplay, it’s disappointing that “The Nice Guys” should end up being so tired and inconsequential. Still, judging by the final scene, Mr Black is hoping that it will be the first in a series, which means that we may get a “Nice Guys 2” set in the 1980s. Look out for shoulder pads, VHS videos, and wisecracks about Ronald Reagan, but don’t expect it to say anything clever about the decade.
