The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)

[flyonthewall2983]

New trailer for Shane Black's The Nice Guys. My first anticipated movie of the year, looks tight and hilarious.

[Luke M]

Shane Black's The Nice Guys is a welcomed return of the near extinct R-rated dark comedy. Probably the most surprising element of the film is how much heart it has including teenage Angourie Rice who steals every scene. I enjoyed it even more than I expected.

[Cold Bishop]

I'm a huge fan of it as well. I don't know if it's as inventive as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but it also jettisons a lot of the smart-alecky, metatextual stuff from it's predecessor, which I'm not sure ever amounted to much*. The result is a much more conventional film**, but one that let's the witty and clever writing shine through. It's not reinventing the wheel, but I'm not sure you could ask for or expect more from a a Shane Black 70s throwback; it delivers exactly what it promises.

*Although it's just as indebted to the paperback Mike Shayne series as it's predecessor: the novel Blue Murder even gets a "suggested by" plug in the credits.

**Along with The Rockford Files, I also detect the influence of the Richard Dreyfuss-starring The Big Fix in it's depiction of shaggy-dog detectives.

[flyonthewall2983]

This is hilarious

[Drucker]

Count me in as another fan. After a pretty bad opening few minutes (semi-gratuitous nudity and definitely gratuitous swearing), the film settles in very well, and very effectively. Gosling unsurprisingly steals the film with a comic timing I've never seen from him before, but Crowe is tops as well, never breaking form and plays his character perfectly straight. No heavy handedness (with the exception of the political explanation two minutes towards the end), the f ilm does a great job of staying true to itself, never going too serious, and always keeps the laughs coming. Recommended.

[cdnchris]

We saw this in a packed theater but my wife said to me afterwards that I and the two elderly ladies sitting next to me were easily laughing the hardest throughout the film. Almost makes me sad that others in the theater probably didn't find this as funny.

[matrixschmatrix]

I don't know that I have a lot to say about it, but I enjoyed it both specifically (it's fun, a reasonably engaging plot, great leads, and an overall engaging aesthetic) but also just as a comedy that feels storyboarded and planned out visually instead of found- I have nothing against improv-y comedies, but it is a refreshing change to see one that has more to offer visually, and it managed it without kind of devolving into a spectacle first action comedy. It reminded me a bit of Inherent Vice- IV's review of it in the AVCub mentions that the porn movie element of the plot becomes Pynchon-esque, but I think there's a fair amount of it hiding throughout, to the movie's benefit- while remaining a distinctly Shane Black movie, with the strengths and weaknesses that entails.

I generally enjoy blockbuster season and comic book movies, but it felt specifically like this was the movie something like Deadpool (or even Black's own Iron Man 3, which is my favorite of the MCU movies) was trying to be, unburdened by the expectations of familiar intellectual property or showy CGI powers-scenes.

[Drucker]

Matrix I agree. My favorite running gag throughout the film was with regards to ducks:

1) duck drawn on Gosling's cast
2) ducks in the pool at the prostitution party
3)

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before Gosling shoots one of the bodyguards at the last party, he yells 'duck'

I'm sure there's more like this I'll notice on re-watch.

[Luke M]

I didn't notice the ducks. I'll have to watch it again. Anyone notice being able to watch the rise of Tim Allen's career based on marquees?

[Finch]

The film worked wonderfully for me as well. I did notice the duck drawing on March's cast but not the other references. I laughed a lot and I enjoyed seeing Crowe and Basinger working together again after L.A. Confidential. I've not seen Iron Man 3 but I absolutely enjoyed The Nice Guys more than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which I found a bit too self-conscious and smug. It's a pity the film is underperforming in the US; hopefully it'll make a profit from oversea takings and home video. I'll be importing the Warner BD for sure in 4-5 months.

[matrixschmatrix]

I noticed the extremely period piece sort of silly dramatic irony the movie was doing with the huge names on the comedy club marquee but I didn't catch that they were changing over the course of the movie. I also had the thought that you can tell a lot about a director from the movies they choose to show when they get a chance to stick a marquee in a movie set in the past- Bogdonovich never misses the chance to get a Hawks or a Ford in there, while Shane Black puts in Airport 77.

[whaleallright]

The billboards and marquees are basically a sampling of blockbusters of the late 1970s: Airport 77, Jaws 2, Smokey and the Bandit....

[flyonthewall2983]

Really enjoyed this. I never would have figured Ryan Gosling as someone with the comedic timing he has here but it was nice, and he played off Russell Crowe (and the girl playing the daughter) well.

My dad noticed that the car Crowe's character was driving was one that my grandfather owned.

[Emak-Bakia]

Count me in as another fan. After a pretty bad opening few minutes (semi-gratuitous nudity and definitely gratuitous swearing), the film settles in very well, and very effectively.

I though the opening was great. It’s basically a stock sexual fantasy for straight 12-year-old males (boy comes to the rescue of woman in distress.) This could be disgusting, but the self-conscious inversion of the typical fantasy makes it work.

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The scene ends not with some improbable sexual fulfilment, but with the object of desire (porn star Misty Mountains) dead and covered in blood, her body discovered by a boy, no doubt traumatized by the disturbing combination of the sexual and violent that is captured in the image of Misty’s nude body sprawled out on the ground, covered in blood spatter.

And the film seems to repeatedly undercut the authority of masculinity. Consider, for instance, the fact that, after the intense gunfight where Crowe and Gosling try to protect Amelia - the brutishness cranked up to 11 for everyone with a gun – it doesn’t end with our brave detectives saving the life of the damsel in distress, but (and rather anticlimactically) she is picked off like a fish in a barrel away from the scene of the action.

Additionally, consider that, for much of the film, while Crowe and Gosling are having fun exchanging gunshots and swinging their dicks around, it’s a tween-age girl (Gosling’s daughter) who is the brains of the operation and gets most of the real detective work done.

Also, I can’t forget to mention Russell Crowe’s disconcerting recounting of the greatest day of his life (the diner scene), which is a frightening example of hyperviolent vigilante justice and uncontained machismo.

So, yeah, I think this questioning of masculinity is definitely on the film’s mind. I’ll have to watch it again with an eye on this aspect in particular. Fortunately, it’s a really enjoyable film, so I certainly won’t be hesitating to view it again once it’s out on home video.

[Drucker]

You make an excellent point, but my complaint was mostly with what I felt to be corny and forced dialogue and nudity, not the set-up of the first scene itself, which definitely pays off in the end.

[flyonthewall2983]

On top of everything else, it has a more accelerated pace than a lot of the movies it gets compared to. It has that feeling of a hazy 70's period piece (though not much of a stoner vibe, apart from one scene), but done with much more momentum.

[PfR73]

This is hilarious

That was great. It also proves Rick Moranis was spot on.

[domino harvey]

The main cast, especially Rice (please tell me some studio is developing a Nancy Drew reboot for her), were fine and carry the picture, but the film itself, while fetishisticly enamored with the '77 setting, owes more to the generic action thrillers of the 80s and 90s, many of which Black cut his screenwriting teeth on. I hated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so this was a few steps up, but I'm still surprised it was so well-received critically here and elsewhere given that it's not any smarter than the median example of its heritage, and I didn't find it especially funny either