Somehow The Nice Guys has reached the 10 year marker at which we can look back and say, yes, this is a classic. Well, duh.
I gave it 5/5 on release almost exactly ten years ago, and then placed it no 2 in my Top 10 Films of 2016. It’s just taken ten years for people to apparently realise, oh hey, this is a pretty good movie. Yes, it is. I’ve watched it not quite ten times, I would say, and it has the re-watchability of the later Mission: Impossible movies. Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is the laconic heavy you hire to rough up a creepy pot-dealer, or the PI who’s dogging your footsteps. The PI in question being Holland March (Ryan Gosling), ethically challenged since California introduced no-fault divorce; in that he now searches for missing husbands while their ashes are on prominent display on their widow’s mantelpiece. And when they reluctantly join forces it is a comic double act for the ages.
The Nice Guys probably was the funniest film of 2016. Writer/director Shane Black almost seems to have lost his vim since its undeserved failure, but he was on top form here when it came to absurdist comic routines. There are a number of set-piece bickering arguments that would not be out of place in a Martin McDonagh script; a joy being March’s refusal to give up on the possibility of romance when all the evidence is staring him in the face that he chose a wrong un. The physicality of Crowe and Gosling quite obviously recalls Laurel & Hardy, with Gosling’s scream a particular joy, as well as his attempt to maintain his dignity in a piece of business involving awkward manoeuvres with a toilet door and a gun, and his later attempt to draw attention to a dead body.
In 2021, as it reached its half-life, I compared this film to the work of David Lynch, particularly Lynch’s description of a screenplay as hoarding ideas like a squirrel collects acorns: when you have gathered forty conceits that’s the guts of an eighty minute movie. And it seems to be oddly applicable to Shane Black’s screenplay, where there are many memorable single moments; like discreetly dumping a dead body over a fence only for it to land on an alfresco dinner party in a lower level mansion; that seem like just such conceits. Strung together they make for a very lively movie, if a very un-Lynchian one. Although there is a giant talking bumblebee at one point…
Who knows, maybe the cinematic gods will see fit to grant us a sequel some decade. Until then, may you never see former President Nixon rushing to tell you that everything’s going to be okay.
Talking Movies 