The Nice Guys

Well, they’re not nice guys, obviously. Movie gumshoes never are – not the tough, terse Philip Marlowe that Humphrey Bogart immortalized in the Forties, and not the loosier-goosier version Elliott Gould played nearly three decades later, nor the pot-addled riff on the genre Joaquin Phoenix put out in 2014’s Inherent Vice. But these professional dicks – pretty dick-ish off the clock, too – have a code nonetheless: Save the girl, even as she’s playing you for a fool; act like you’re only in it for the paycheck, while never letting on that the real prize is in bringing the crooks and the corrupt bastards down a peg. (Hard, hard-boiled truth: You can’t keep a real bastard down.)

Writer/director Shane Black already made a valentine to the hard-boiled detective hero in 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Here, co-writing with Anthony Bagarozzi, he wears the same L.A. noir influence, but resists meta-narrating it this time, for a likably tetchy comedy squinting its way through the chest cough of Los Angeles smog circa 1977. (Smog is to The Nice Guys as drought is to Chinatown.) When a dame goes missing, two (not that nice!) guys go looking for her: P.I. Holland March (Gosling), a single father marinating in drink over his dead wife, and a bruiser named Jackson Healy (Crowe) who has his own demons. Reluctantly – like, after one guy breaks the other guy’s arm – they team up to solve the case of the missing girl, chasing clues to the porn industry and Detroit’s auto industry, with March’s crafty pre-teen daughter (the winning Rice) playing Their Girl Friday.

The porn milieu occasions a smattering of déclassé boob shots that went out of style in the Eighties, back when Black first launched his career scripting the first two Lethal Weapon movies. Low-hanging fruit, that, and the same complaint could be lobbed at half the jokes in this comedic thriller. But the other half sings – or zings, whatever – and let’s just all agree now that the Canadian Ryan Gosling is our national treasure. (Canada didn’t know what to do with him.) The tough-guy pose, that De Niro diction he’s spouted in so many dramas – it’s found its true roost in The Nice Guys: as a joke, and one that the actor is 110% in on. I’m not sure I’ve laughed harder all year than at Gosling in a bathroom stall, accidentally dropping a lit cigarette down his pants leg.