Shane Black
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The film plays like an homage to those old Altman ’70s movies like The Long Goodbye without feeling stuck in the past.
Because this is set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, we're supposed to think back to Chinatown and The Long Goodbye and excuse the opaque plot, around which Black's eccentric gags float like seasoned croutons in bland soup.
It clearly recalls such 1970s fare as The Long Goodbye (1973)and Chinatown (1974), as well as such largely forgotten titles as Busting (1974) and 1978’s The Big Fix, which featured Richard Dreyfuss as a stoner private eye with a cast on his arm just like Gosling has here — something unlikely to be coincidental.
With The Nice Guys, his wildly entertaining new detective comedy, Black visits the smog-choked, libertine Los Angeles of the mid- to late 1970s, a few years and a few miles removed from private eyes like Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye or Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice.
On one level, the film offers a sleazy 70s comic riposte to the 30 intrigues of Polanski’s epochal Chinatown, with the merest whiff of Altman’s The Long Goodbye and inevitable casting echoes of LA Confidential.
Taking a page from his 2005 feature debut "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," writer-director Shane Black has made a tonally spry escapade with undeniable parallels to Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" (1973), Ridley Scott's " Matchstick Men " (2003), and Paul Thomas Anderson's " Inherent Vice " (2014).
Director Shane Black is no stranger to the Predator franchise having starred as Rick Hawkins in 1987’s Predator.
This is the quintessential question that the latest and sixth, blockbusting Predator instalment (including the Aliens vs Predator franchise) repeatedly provokes from the viewer as it hurls everything including the sci-fi sink at the screen.
There is a running inside joke perpetuated by Olivia Munn and Sterling K. Brown’s characters in The Predator that calls into question the titular nickname as an incorrect moniker for the dexterously deadly alien life-form bouncing around their Georgia landscape.
Sporting the taxonomically useless title “The Predator,” the latest movie in the “Predator” franchise comes courtesy of Shane Black ( “The Nice Guys” ), who appeared as comic relief in the 1987 original and seems to have taken that experience to heart.
You walk into each new Predator movie with a very specific, and very rigid, set of questions.
Far be it for me to engage in spoilers right off the bat, so let’s keep this vague and just state that a particular character in The Predator, the latest in the stop-start series that began back in 1987, dies.
The Nice Guys is as much inspired by Black’s own reverence for classic ’70s private eye movies such as Chinatown or the tough guy films of Lee Marvin or John Cassavettes, as it is the filmmaker’s own back catalogue.
It’s in the range of Chinatown and Inherent Vice , though comparing The Nice Guys to these films is prejudicial.
In “The Nice Guys” we’re hanging out in Los Angeles circa 1977 where the neon buzz of “Boogie Nights” is everywhere and the veins of corruption, akin to “L.A. Confidential” and “Chinatown,” run deep.
It just wants you to remember Los Angeles detective conspiracies like “Chinatown,” “The Big Lebowski” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” lean back and enjoy the ride.
Because this is set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, we're supposed to think back to Chinatown and The Long Goodbye and excuse the opaque plot, around which Black's eccentric gags float like seasoned croutons in bland soup.
And while his convoluted plot aspires to stir memories of the likes of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential (the latter starring two of this film's players, Crowe and Kim Basinger), it's really not much more complicated or polished than any given episode of Magnum, P.I.
Boogie Nights (1997)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced The Nice Guys (2016)
Visuals Themes
These accomplished dramatic thespians fully buy into the deadpan style tinged with a funky aesthetic, in which brutal beatings mesh seamlessly with pratfalls, and tributes to Abbott & Costello comfortably reside along sequences that might have felt at home in “Boogie Nights.”
In “The Nice Guys” we’re hanging out in Los Angeles circa 1977 where the neon buzz of “Boogie Nights” is everywhere and the veins of corruption, akin to “L.A. Confidential” and “Chinatown,” run deep.
And Black gleefully sets the film in 1978, in a "Boogie Nights" world of smoggy skies, happy pornographers and a crunchy-granola California still full of flakes and nuts.
So is the typography of the opening credits: soft curves and candy stripes, as seen in “Boogie Nights” (1997).
Still, as stand-alone capers go, this scattershot sampling of Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson's “Boogie Nights” and “Inherent Vice,” is not without its pleasures.
Lethal Weapon (1987)
Directed by Richard Donner
influenced The Nice Guys (2016), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), The Predator (2018), Iron Man 3 (2013)
Black, who hit it big straight out of college with the screenplay for Lethal Weapon, has made a career out of a “have your cake and eat it, too” mentality, deconstructing clichés even as he gorges himself on them.
Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling star in "The Nice Guys" a new film written and directed by Shane ("Lethal Weapon") Black.
The movie is written and directed by Shane Black, who wrote the first two Lethal Weapon movies and, more recently, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3.
That’s the level of humor in The Nice Guys, the latest endeavor from Shane Black, whose Lethal Weapon helped make him the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood thirty years ago.
The Nice Guys was written and directed by Shane Black, who also wrote The Lethal Weapon movies.
At best, you’ll generally get some sort of middle ground in between options 1 and 2 which pretty well sums up writer-director Shane Black’s (“Lethal Weapon,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”) stab at “Iron Man 3.”
Black's homages are also a nice touch: Gosling amusingly channels Lou Costello in panic-stricken mode at one point, and there's a glimpse of a billboard promoting Airport '77 and an early teaser ad for 1978's Jaws 2 (I'm guessing Universal Pictures paid Warner Bros. a hefty sum for those plugs, since Warner is behind The Nice Guys while Universal has both the Airport and Jaws franchises arriving on Blu-ray next month).
From the opening establishing shot, which creeps out from behind the decaying and disrepaired Hollywood sign to the tiny background details (the 1977 setting is reconfirmed by billboards for the blockbusters of the day, like Smokey and the Bandit and Airport ’77) to the in-jokes (the porn producer’s latest is an adult version of Pinocchio, using the “It’s not my nose that grows” tagline of an actual porn film from earlier in the decade) to the tributes (a drunken Gosling discovers a dead body, and his wheezing, yelping take is full-on Lou Costello).
The real setting is a slightly anachronistic Los Angeles limbo where billboards for Airport ’77 and Jaws 2 tower over an intersection and worries about pollution, gas shortages, and killer bees are in the air.
Black's homages are also a nice touch: Gosling amusingly channels Lou Costello in panic-stricken mode at one point, and there's a glimpse of a billboard promoting Airport '77 and an early teaser ad for 1978's Jaws 2 (I'm guessing Universal Pictures paid Warner Bros. a hefty sum for those plugs, since Warner is behind The Nice Guys while Universal has both the Airport and Jaws franchises arriving on Blu-ray next month).
Our heroes, Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) and Holland March (Ryan Gosling), pass a billboard for “Jaws 2,” which didn’t come out until the summer of 1978.
The movie is a straight-up noir, another of Black’s love-hate letters to Los Angeles, this one set in 1977, when the city was choking in smog and billboards for crummy sequels like Jaws 2 and Airport 1977 dotted Sunset Boulevard.
The real setting is a slightly anachronistic Los Angeles limbo where billboards for Airport ’77 and Jaws 2 tower over an intersection and worries about pollution, gas shortages, and killer bees are in the air.
Billboards trumpet the hottest movies: Jaws 2 , Airport 77 .
It just wants you to remember Los Angeles detective conspiracies like “Chinatown,” “The Big Lebowski” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” lean back and enjoy the ride.
While the film isn't as tightly edited as a Coen product, there are shades of The Big Lebowski in its narrative, which spins out to outlandish lengths only to culminate in a bit of throwaway irony.
Basically, it’s Inherent Vice without the highbrow aspirations, or The Big Lebowski with two Dudes.
El detective de poca monta y el detective por casualidad no llegan a ser narradores tan explícitos como el rompedor de la cuarta pared que encarnó Robert Downey Jr. en Entre besos y tiros; pero sí protagonizan una monumental cantidad de situaciones propias de la comicidad que Black y otros exponentes -como los hermanos Coen en El gran Lebowski (The Big Lebowski, 1998) o Paul Thomas Anderson en Vicio propio (Inherent Vice, 2014)-, le han inyectado a las tramas de crimen y misterio.
There are echoes, too, of Magnolia, Get Shorty, The Big Lebowski , and Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre.
The Nice Guys is of a piece with two previous films: The Coen Brothers’ 1998 The Big Lebowski and Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 Inherent Vice.
Inherent Vice (2014)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced The Nice Guys (2016), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Plot Themes Visuals
Black has no interest in reinventing the buddy-cop movie, or even the ’70s private-eye mystery; he’s not trying to replicate what Paul Thomas Anderson did in Inherent Vice.
If this movie bears a strong generic resemblance to Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent “Inherent Vice” and Howard Hawks’ classic “The Big Sleep,” for instance, it’s self-consciously aimed at viewers who’ve never even heard of those pictures, let alone seen them.
Still, as stand-alone capers go, this scattershot sampling of Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson's “Boogie Nights” and “Inherent Vice,” is not without its pleasures.
The Southern California setting and the shaggy-dog private-eye plot may remind you of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice,” though “The Nice Guys” lacks that movie’s wistful, slyly political sense of history.
El detective de poca monta y el detective por casualidad no llegan a ser narradores tan explícitos como el rompedor de la cuarta pared que encarnó Robert Downey Jr. en Entre besos y tiros; pero sí protagonizan una monumental cantidad de situaciones propias de la comicidad que Black y otros exponentes -como los hermanos Coen en El gran Lebowski (The Big Lebowski, 1998) o Paul Thomas Anderson en Vicio propio (Inherent Vice, 2014)-, le han inyectado a las tramas de crimen y misterio.
But The Nice Guys rarely channels a specific film (it resembles Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice from 2015, also a 1970 period piece).
It clearly recalls such 1970s fare as The Long Goodbye (1973)and Chinatown (1974), as well as such largely forgotten titles as Busting (1974) and 1978’s The Big Fix, which featured Richard Dreyfuss as a stoner private eye with a cast on his arm just like Gosling has here — something unlikely to be coincidental.
Black and co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi engineer a fusion of the ‘70s private eye picture (there are echoes of The Long Goodbye, Hickey & Boggs, and The Big Fix) and the ‘80s buddy movie (which Lethal Weapon screenwriter Black knows a little something about).
Black, cinematographer Phillippe Rousselot and the production design team re-create an ultra-smoggy, 1977 Los Angeles filled with touchstones from the era, from the signage at The Comedy Store touting Robert Klein, Richard Lewis and Tim Allen to the billboard for “Smokey and the Bandit” to the fashion and the cars of the time to a hired assassin nicknamed “John Boy” because he resembles the young hero of “The Waltons.”
From the opening establishing shot, which creeps out from behind the decaying and disrepaired Hollywood sign to the tiny background details (the 1977 setting is reconfirmed by billboards for the blockbusters of the day, like Smokey and the Bandit and Airport ’77) to the in-jokes (the porn producer’s latest is an adult version of Pinocchio, using the “It’s not my nose that grows” tagline of an actual porn film from earlier in the decade) to the tributes (a drunken Gosling discovers a dead body, and his wheezing, yelping take is full-on Lou Costello).
The Big Sleep (1946)
Directed by Howard Hawks
influenced Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), The Nice Guys (2016)
Plot Themes
If this movie bears a strong generic resemblance to Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent “Inherent Vice” and Howard Hawks’ classic “The Big Sleep,” for instance, it’s self-consciously aimed at viewers who’ve never even heard of those pictures, let alone seen them.
The plot veers toward the nonsensical but, like The Big Sleep , other strengths overwhelm narrative holes and inconsistencies.
As with some of the famous noir films of the 1940s, most notably “The Big Sleep,” the plot of “The Nice Guys” isn’t important.
He still loved the buddy-movie genre — the film's throwback quality started with the casting of Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer in the lead roles — but the sheer musicality of the writing, with its dextrous wit and nested conspiracies, evoked the shaggy-dog tradition of LA noir, from The Big Sleep to The Big Lebowski.
This is hardly the first time that daughters play a central role in a Hollywood-set mystery — The Big Sleep and Chinatown leap quickly to mind — and this one not only features the almost incongruously well-balanced Holly but Amelia, a young crusader who knows too much for her own good about the true intentions of the high and mighty as well as the low and slimy.
In updating Raymond Chandler’s lowlife Los Angeles to the garish 1970s, the picture recalls the famously muddled plot mechanics of Chandler’s The Big Sleep—it’s sometimes baffling, and it doesn’t seem to care.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
influenced by Iron Man 3 (2013)
For all of the voluminous expository dialogue in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings , essentially none of it concerns the legend of the Ten Rings — a name that doubles for both a nebulous criminal organization (already referenced in Iron Man and Iron Man 3 ) and a set of ill-defined mystical weapons whose powers basically function however the plot requires.
Elsewhere, the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes its presence even more pointedly known by way of cameos, references to the Blip (i.e., the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame ) and an exhaustive explanation of what the Ten Rings of this title has to do with the Ten Rings from Iron Man 3 .
When it comes to the disappointments of Shang-Chi , the biggest is actually the fault of the movie's premiere, which featured the announcement that Ben Kingsley would be returning as Iron Man 3 's Trevor Slattery AKA the fake Mandarin.
Leung plays Wenwu, the man whose identity Ben Kingsley’s The Mandarin appropriated in Iron Man 3 , and whose hand has been quietly guiding history for thousands of years – all thanks to the power and immortality granted to him by ten magical rings of unknown provenance.
By the way, the way in which the film addresses the last MCU inclusion of the Ten Rings offers some much-needed closure, though I wouldn’t have minded if it also sought to address the kidnapping of Tony Stark ( Iron Man ) as relates to Iron Man 3 (2013) because not everyone remembers Aldrich Killian’s final line and that lack of remembrance could play havoc with the audience’s processing of the internal timeline/rules of Shang-Chi .
Marvel fans already know about the Ten Rings thanks to the much-derided Iron Man 3 , but this iteration is a far more enjoyable and earnest ride.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
Directed by Renny Harlin
influenced Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), The Nice Guys (2016), The Predator (2018), Iron Man 3 (2013)
Which is to say that anyone hoping for the verbal and conceptual excesses of The Long Kiss Goodnight or The Last Boy Scout may be disappointed, despite an outré opening sequence that links violent death, cheesy erotica, and teenage guilt.
Shane Black, once evisceration fodder alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Predator” and a top-paid screenwriter “The Long Kiss Goodnight” in the 1990s, has been something of a rebirth monkey within the studio system – last seen directing an “Iron Man” installment and now, as writer and director, serving up something very retro, macho and immensely entertaining.
They really should have waited, and hated him for writing "The Last Boy Scout," "The Last Action Hero" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight," a perfect triple-feature of slick, violent trash.
So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some heads and lots of one-liners, much of it familiar from his earlier scripts — Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — and almost defiantly meaningless.
Shane Black didn’t invent the Hollywood buddy action flick, but as a hot-hand screenwriter back in the ’80s and ’90s he certainly elevated it to hilarious new meta heights with Lethal Weapon and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
A vital player to the sub-genre is of course Shane Black, the man who wrote Lethal Weapon and The Long Kiss Goodnight, and directed the vastly underseen and undervalued Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Next came 1990’s Predator 2, directed by Stephen Hopkins and starring Danny Glover as an unhinged cop in cartoon-war-zone Los Angeles, where another Predator is vacationing for reasons that are never entirely explained.
McKenna is pursued by Brown’s Will Traeger and his operation of exploitative agents and technicians, including Jake Busey’s Sean Keyes, the son of Gary Busey’s Peter Keyes from Predator 2, and Munn’s enlisted stargazing biologist Casey Brackett, looking to capture and study the invasive foe.
There are moments in the film that suggest Black is attempting a new angle on the story of the silent alien villain that’s stalked action heroes such as Arnold Schwarzenegger (Predator), Danny Glover (Predator 2), and … Adrien Brody ( the serious misfire Predators).
Belatedly following on from the events of the cult classic Predator and its urban sequel Predator 2 (and thankfully ignoring the Predator/Alien hybrids), the film picks up mid-pursuit between two Predator space-ships.
The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Directed by Tony Scott
influenced The Predator (2018), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), The Nice Guys (2016), Iron Man 3 (2013)
Themes
Which is to say that anyone hoping for the verbal and conceptual excesses of The Long Kiss Goodnight or The Last Boy Scout may be disappointed, despite an outré opening sequence that links violent death, cheesy erotica, and teenage guilt.
They really should have waited, and hated him for writing "The Last Boy Scout," "The Last Action Hero" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight," a perfect triple-feature of slick, violent trash.
So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some heads and lots of one-liners, much of it familiar from his earlier scripts — Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — and almost defiantly meaningless.
Black excels at making mismatched buddy movies (he made his directorial debut with the wonderful “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”), and he helped define the action era with his screenplays for “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout.”
Like many of the films Black penned during his initial glory days as Hollywood’s go-to screenwriter for macho-comical action films (his credits include 1987’s Lethal Weapon, 1991’s The Last Boy Scout, and 1993’s Last Action Hero), The Nice Guys is a buddy movie about two unlikely partners who are forced to work together.
For The Nice Guys (2016), Shane Black, who helped remake the modern American action movie with his screenplays Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, slips into flashback mode for a tribute to the old school action movies and private eye thrillers of the 1970s mixed with Black’s knowing sense of humor.
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
Directed by Charles Barton
influenced The Nice Guys (2016)
Characters
Fans of the comedy horror classic “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” will instantly pick up that Gosling is channelling Lou Costello as he soundlessly tries to attract his partner’s attention while simultaneously conveying the horror of his bloody discovery.
These films were legendary, from Rambo (1982) to Commando (1985) and Lethal Weapon (1987), Cobra (1986) and Action Jackson (1988), and, of course, Predator.
In its Rambo-alike moments, the first Predator converted echoes of Vietnam into cheesy thrills.
The two get tossed together after a porn actress named Misty Mountains dies in a car crash (one that is both a fulfillment of a 12-year-old boy’s ultimate fantasy and a cagey homage to Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out”) and her aunt, who wears Coke-bottle bottoms for glasses, insists she’s still alive and hires March to find her; another interested party hires Healy to get March off the case.
Credit to Shane Black: many of the films evoked here (from Michael Bay’s “The Rock” to Wes Craven’s fiercely self-aware “Scream” series to Henry Winkler’s semi-obscure kids movie “Cop & 1/2”) are direct descendants of his, making the pic’s shortcomings more or less a byproduct of his own ingenuity.
The film is once again rooted in his affection for mismatched partners forced to solve a mystery laced with boldly-drawn villains, noir-trappings, hilariously rapid-fire dialogue, and frequent bursts of violence, but like 1996’s Scream , the movie is simultaneously a take down of its genre cliches and a brilliant example of that same genre.