It’s Eric, with thoughts on the new Gosling/Crowe comedy, The Nice Guys.
I’ll bet this project looked amazing on paper. Bring writer/director Shane Black back to the comic buddy picture world where he started with 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Set the film in the disco-cool world of 1977 Los Angeles. Hire two accomplished dramatic actors, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, to play the leads, two low-life losers on the fringe of detective work unexpectedly uniting to hunt for a girl involved in a series of murders in the porn industry. Throw in a cute daughter for Gosling’s character for some sweetness.
So it’s sad to report that the execution of that potentially vibrant cocktail ultimately results in mostly a shrug with The Nice Guys. Black is a talented guy, and it’s clear what he’s going for: these are movie-movie characters, not to be confused with people who act like people do in real life (e.g., we’re introduced to Gosling as he lies in a bathtub full of water in full clothing). His movie-cute daughter is cut right from the kind of eye-rolling clichés we’ve seen for years: full of moxie, swearing beyond her years. But the characters lack the vibrancy that the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover characters had in Black’s original film…there was a live-wire element in Black’s early writing that was surprising and exciting, but here the leads are written as low-key, hangdog guys largely indistinguishable from each other. There’s no real conflict between them, so there’s no tension or drama, nothing to ignite off the other.
Black aims to both recreate an 80s buddy action film and comment on it simultaneously, which he does to varying levels of success throughout the picture. He scores best during a sequence where Gosling and Crowe go to the penthouse level of a hotel, only to second-hand witness a series of comically executed deaths as they are in, out, and back down the elevator. This set piece illustrates what the picture is going for but rarely reaches: a smart take on a “dumb” genre, which both indulges and satirizes the pleasures we’ve come to expect from comic action movies.
The biggest failure here is that Black doesn’t deliver the “comic” portion of that genre requirement. Black and his co-writer Anthony Bagarazzi forgot something crucial: jokes. Their script feels largely devoid of actual intelligent jokes, or entertaining banter, and the feeble attempts here and there mostly fall flat when they do deliver. The laughs don’t land, and Black’s pace with the comedy feels dismayingly languorous.
If anyone needed to do a comedy, it’s Russell Crowe. It’s almost difficult to think back to a time when Crowe was one of our most electrifying dramatic actors, since his choices over the last decade or so have been so colossally boring and serious. There’s pleasure to be had in watching him do something so different and light, but his work here is largely uninspired. He and Gosling never quite find the killer chemistry you want them to reach.
Black finds some inspired bits of comedy for Gosling (an extended door-closing attempt on the toilet, many pratfalls), and Gosling executes them with finesse. Gosling’s acting has more spark than Crowe’s, but he never gets killer funny lines to really drive it home. Perhaps Black didn’t know how to harness what Gosling was conjuring on his own to bring it to a higher level.
The film was shot by the great cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (Queen Margot, A River Runs Through It), but even his work doesn’t feel inspired. It’s pretty much your standard-issue LA crime movie look, and the 70s setting doesn’t invigorate the picture in any particular way either. Sadly, The Nice Guys feels curiously uninventive across the board. It left me feeling mostly bummed.