Shane Black is a lunacy craftsmen. He’s quite good at taking any story and pushing it into the absurd. The Nice Guys is already replete with scenarios (crazy adult film parties) and a time period (disco era 70s) Black could exploit; all he needed was some star power. Fortunately for Black, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are two nice guys ready to tell some jokes and get in some hijinks that the director tells them to get into.
The movie revolves around a teenage girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who is on the run from some bad people in LA in the 1970s. Fortunately she is being searched for by two men. Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a paid for hire thug trying to make ends meet, and Holland March (Ryan Gosling) is a mediocre private investigator trying to raise his daughter Holly (Angourie Rice). Holland, Jackson, and Holly, while searching for Amelia, keep widening the scope of the investigation due to what they keep learning potentially uncovering some serious stuff.
When this movie is just shooting the shit, The Nice Guys is great. Shane Black, before directing, is a great writer (he wrote Lethal Weapon and Iron Man 3), and here he merges two things he’s great at writing for. Holland and Jackson have that mismatched buddy thing going, with the straight laced Crowe bouncing off the sarcastic Gosling, and Angourie Rice adds the adult/child relationship Black previously did in the third Iron Man. These two combinations create a tripod of mismatching personalities that make the one liners flow with relative ease. Like any movie though, the stakes build to make the plot more meaningful, but as a result, the prickly dialogue must exit. That would be fine, except The Nice Guys rushes the conspiracies and blows the scope too far to have the statements the movie tries to make mean anything significant. The lower the stakes, the more chances there are to let Black showcase his dialogue, and if they end up making sequels, I would like the case to be ridiculously tiny and just as bizarre.
The Nice Guys also has a couple great set pieces that Black works to humorous delirium: one is an auto show, one is a porn star party. Each sequence lets Black run his imagination wild: porn mermaids, people as tables, classic car glitter, etc. In addition, Black loves reaction shots (part of the reason he loves working with Robert Downey Jr.), and Gosling might be his new muse. Over and over the hunky actor finds new ways to look surprised with an emotional twist, and each one gets a big laugh. Angourie Rice and Russell Crowe do wonders just chilling surrounded by fantastical elements, and their unreaction coupled with Gosling’s overreaction takes each reaction cut to funnier heights. While it could have also been manipulative to put a little girl in danger in these locations, Rice displays an amazing spunkiness and adaptation to her circumstances, making her a third investigator and not just Holland’s daughter. These outlandish sequence play to all of Black’s strengths as a writer/director, making it easy for each of the actors to look good and do their jobs well.
The Nice Guys gets a lot of good will by how fun it must have been to make. Shane Black stays in his wheelhouse, and has a blast creating a crazy situation and letting Ryan Gosling loose on it. But come on dude, Christmas again? I understand you love the holiday, but it was unnecessary here, and you just threw it in to make yourself feel better.