Great Comedy and Characters

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2016)

The Nice Guys follows two private investigators who are brought together to look into the death of a porn star and another woman's involvement in it.
I didn't know this was a comedy until about 20 minutes before I decided to watch it. I thought it was going to be a serious murder mystery or something. I was wrong, and I'm pretty happy about it.
The comedy is, while sparsely placed throughout the movie, great. It almost always hits, and when it does, it hits hard. The jokes are pretty hilarious and well-presented. It often takes clichés of the genre and, in a very self-aware way, turns it into an original joke. And I liked that. It was clever, but it was also very dumb. The characters are often goofy and fun, and yet no one felt out of place.
The characters are great. I had a blast with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe's characters. They have great chemistry together, and I can't wait to see them together again. This is easily my favorite performance by Gosling as well. I've liked him as an actor in the past, but he's always been that guy that I mistake for Ryan Reynolds and hasn't really had any hugely memorable roles to me. And yet, here he manages to squeeze out of that place and really blow me away. He perfectly portrays this character, and I really hope to see him play characters like this in the future. Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling's daughter, does a pretty good job too.
When the movie is good, it's great. However, there are a handful of points that take pretty big dips. There's one scene where a woman supposedly jumps out of a building and lands on the roof of someone's car. And she just kind of appears. It was super abrupt and didn't make much sense, and knowing which floor the character was on made it hard to believe that she jumped and landed without injuring herself or the car. Sure, there are explanations the audience could draw themselves, like she climbed down and jumped at a reasonable height, but it was just so abrupt that it seemed lazy, like the writers realized that they didn't know how to wrap a major aspect of the story up so they literally dropped it on the main characters.
Also, Angourie Rice's character, Holly, wasn't my favorite. While she was an interesting enough character, and she provided some depth to the others, her role was kind of forced. She gets way more involved than she realistically should have, and does things she really shouldn't have. Sure, there's a level of comedy to her role, but the rest of the movie still manages to be realistic. When we have a little 13-year- old girl beating up grown adults with guns, it just gets to be a little too much.
Despite this, the problems I had were weighed out by the good, and it didn't stop me from having a blast.
Overall The Nice Guys is a great movie. The characters are fun, the performances are great, the comedy is great, but some aspects, including Holly, take the movie down just a notch. In the end I would definitely recommend this movie.