A fresh take on the genre, with fantastic writing.

Rating: 10/10 (2 October 2016)

Some Spoilers Might Have Slipped Through.
"The Nice Guys" follows two private detectives who are both looking for a girl called Amelia, who has a connection to the death of a porn star.
This movie was directed by Shane Black, who has also written the screenplay for the movie. He did a really good job at directing. His use of shadow is amazing. One scene in particular stood out to me. This was the one, where March falls down the cliff, and discovers the body of someone. By his use of shadow the body stays hidden, but you can feel that something is there by the camera movement. When March uses his lighter we finally see the reveal and the body is shown. That scene is handled in such a comical and scary way, with beautiful cinematography that it might be my favorite scene of the entire movie. But this is just one example of the use of shadow. He uses this a lot, but most of the time the were not used to enforce the comedic element of the scene. The lighting in the night scenes were also nicely done. He also uses very cool camera movements, especially the ones where he moves the camera from a driving car, goes up in the air, gives a shot of LA, and than goes to the place they are driving. There are a couple of them in the movie, but it never get's tiring. He also handled the action scenes very well. They were cut and shot like they were done in the 80's. He also managed to put some comedic elements in these scenes which gave a nice whole. To give one minor criticism is on the editing. This is near the end of the movie, when Gosling and Crowe are sitting at a bar. Crowe's often puts the cigar in his mouth and smokes it, but when there were different cuts, you could see his hand suddenly switching positions and the length of the cigar can also grow or shrink between cuts. This is really my only bit of criticism on the technical side of the movie.
The acting also was very good. March, who I've mentioned earlier was played by Ryan Gosling. Before going into the movie, I knew that he was going to be good, that's just how Gosling acts. Now I've seen the movie, I can confirm my thoughts going into the movie. Gosling made his character feel real and gave something more to it than just the character that was written down. You could see that his character had a damaged past. Russel Crowe also was very good. He played the other private detective. He also brought a lot to the character, not in the way Gosling did, but by gaining weight. This added to how you felt about his character and pointed out his style of living. Both Gosling and Crowe had very good chemistry and they play with it, which only makes the movie better and funnier. Goslings character also has a daughter and she was very good. She played with emotion and was convincing. There were multiple antagonists in the movie, but I'll just pick one, and this one is played by Matt Bomer. I picked him, because I didn't know he was in the movie. The character he plays here is totally different than any others he has played before
The writing was, like I've said, written by Shane Black. But he had some help with it by Anthony Bagarozzi. The script was absolutely the best part of the whole movie. This is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. I laughed with every joke, and still thinking back of them, or reading them on the "quote" part on IMDb, I laugh, not out loud, but chuckles. Which is not a bad thing, because the movie was not aiming for me to laugh uncontrollably. There were some on going jokes in the movie, and every time they're still funny. The story was well thought out and complex. It was interesting to follow, due to said complexity, but also due to the great dialogue overall, not just the jokes. The characters were multi-layered and differed from each other. Like the difference between Russel Crowes character and Ryan Goslings. Both are very different, yet they seem very similar. Both are damaged people, but March is just less professional. The character I really want to mention is Holly, the daughter of March. She was useful in the movie. She was funny and smart and actually helped to get the story move. She was not just some one there to be funny or be cute or something. No she actually did something and that's really seldom looking at the movies that come out today. The bad guy, played by Matt Bomer, was good. His character was scary and hidden throughout the movie, but this only made him more threatening. The character was just not that well developed as I would've liked to see, but still a good character.
In the end this was a very good movie, the best movie that came out in 2016, that I've seen, even. The directing was very good, the characters were varied and well acted. The jokes were funny and don't get boring. The story was well thought out and fitted well together in the end of the movie.
9.5/10