Verdict:
The Nice Guys is like a pilot episode to a good TV show that never happened. It’s that 90’s action flick that comes on TV on a random Thursday evening, which you watch only partially, because you can’t decide if you want to watch this movie, the show on National Geographic or The Peacekeeper that’s just starting on another channel.
It is a polished buddy-cop action movie at heart, with excellent performances from most actors. The little girl who plays the daughter of one of the detectives is adorable. At the centre of the film is the dynamic between Russel Crowe and Ryan Gosling, with Crowe playing a seasoned bruiser while Gosling is playing an incompetent tragic figure with a heart of gold. Their witty banter is supported by excellent physical comedic performance from Gosling.
The camera work is clean, without any shaky cam, and the action is appropriately dumb, as it seems to imitate the bad action movies of the 80s and 90s, while still maintaining a polished production values of a modern production. Everything clicks together when you find out that one of the writers is Shane Black, who also cowrote Lethal Weapon.
Ironically, the story is set in the 70s and not 80s or 90s, with the costumes, sets, and soundtrack all contributing to the film’s retro vibe. The retro vide is very clean. The 70’s never looked so clean and crispy. It’s unclear why this film had to be a period piece, other than to add some flavour.
This is where the good ends, as there is little else to this movie. There is no depth to any of the characters. They give the main character a tragic backstory, but it doesn’t figure into the rest of the movie. There is no good villain. The back-and-forth between the main characters is nice, but the rest of the script is not that smart, and there’s no big twist. The story is a just a simple murder investigation.
You’ll want to see more of these nice guys after watching the film, indicating that it’s perhaps time for a good buddy-cop show. But as a one-off, this was unremarkable and lacked depth. Still, I hope that movies like this don’t disappear. In the age of Marvel soup, The Nice Guys is a sip of clean cool water.