The Nice Guys (2016)
Directed by Shane Black
A private eye investigates the apparent suicide of a fading porn star in 1970s Los Angeles and uncovers a conspiracy.
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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).
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.
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.
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.
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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.
So this period action-comedy/shaggy dog story, co-written and directed by Shane Black (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” an even better example of the formula), earns points for its sheer novelty: a broad summer motion picture that is rooted in terrain resembling reality, albeit a stylized ’70s Los Angeles version of it.
Director Shane Black and his co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi produce a highly enjoyable companion piece to Black’s equally enjoyable but sadly ignored Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), another trigger-happy comedy about two mismatched detectives unraveling a hilariously complicated mystery.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang this is not.
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.
This movie is more on the level of Black’s directorial debut, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, an overblown L.A. action yarn with a smartass sense of humor.
Directed and written by Shane Black, whose brand of offbeat irony and throwaway action permeates his previous Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3, the movie enjoys all the politically incorrect pleasures of the Seventies with a knowing chuckle.
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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).