Shane Black sets a pair of sound-hearted sterling-outrageous guys off on the trail of a lost porn star in a crime caper that’s touched by Anderson,Altman and HiaasenBefore our emotionally literate, twenty-first century world invented the idea of the “bromance”, or we had the buddy comedy: films like California Split,Freebie And The Bean, not to mention Roger Moore and Tony Curtis in The Persuaders on television. Writer-director Shane Black’s horribly enjoyable action comedy The Nice Guys is an jauntily arch return to this tradition, and the story of two dishevelled and incompetent private detectives in 1970s Los Angeles — played by Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling — who acquire been expensively tasked with solving the mystery surrounding the death of a lost porn actress,and what other kind of fascinatingly damaged female character can there be? It’s a comedy hardboiled noir, a plastic Black Dahlia with something of PT Anderson’s Boogie Nights, or Altman’s version of Long Goodbye and even some weird touches of Lynch as characters catch up from car wrecks to stagger around the highway for a bit. Fans of Carl Hiaasens crime novel Skin Tight might also feel that Black has possibly read Hiaasen’s work. As for the possible influence of Polanski’s Chinatown,there’s a father-daughter relationship here, but that’s rather wholesome and heartwarming.
These are wised-up tough guys who fire killer lines as well as their automatics, and action devotee Shane Black absolutely loves for people to be thrown through glass windows (the special fake sugar-glass kind used on movie sets that crumble into a shower of crystal pellets as the body sails through,unhurt); he creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two sterling traditional fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along. When our heroes complain about being briefly detained for questioning by a uniformed LA cop, the officer says: “I’m just carrying out my orders”. Black gives us time to guess what acid reply is coming and then Ryan Gosling says: “Yeah, or well,you know who else was just following orders? Hitler!” Crowe winces at his partner getting the comeback just that bit wrong.
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Source: theguardian.com