A Good Pairing Hampered By Weak Script

Rating: 5/10 (14 August 2016)

I think one either likes this movie quite well or feels like it was a much larger opportunity missed. For this viewer it was the latter. As the movie began I felt it had promise especially because Russell Crowe was likable slug Nick Nolte type and I liked his character. The film has a definite film noir nod, but it's a late 70's period buddy crime flick to be more precise. It does try to inject continuous comedy, but none of it is knee-slapping funny as it's more of a low-key, fairly constant, comedy.
The story is pretty lame which is the main (only) problem. A young woman, Amelia Kuttner, whose mother is the head of the justice department (Kim Bassinger playing Judith Kuttner) seeks to reveal her mom is corrupt in letting the Big 3 auto makers off the hook for pollution. Think that doesn't sound stupid, well the vehicle to reveal all this malfeasance is an "art house porn" flick staring the daughter. The inane reason for this was to shame the mother and get the maximum exposure only a porn movie could get? This is all while the porn industry in LA starts having mysterious deaths, including the top star, the top director, and this art house porn ,wanna be, director, With the last one the Amelia Kuttner film aimed at her mother's corruption goes missing. This is, basically, the mystery our two needy private eyes must unravel: find Amelia and the film. Oh, and stay alive since death seems to swirl around lately.
Speaking of the twosome, I also like Ryan Gosling's acting and the character he plays. I found the young lady playing his daughter quite talented in her role. However, I do still get a bit uncomfortable seeing an impressionable youth in the middle of quite a bit of depravity being depicted. Since her dad (Gosling) is a bit of drunk she actually looks more after him than he does her. So I guess it serves that purpose, but I'm still a bit uncomfortable.
Well, this is, in my opinion, a weak buddy movie from a director who is known to be capable of better. Maybe he did as much as he could given the story since - as stated earlier: the story is weak. A viewer could do worse for an evening's entertainment. Make sure your expectations aren't too high and the film is still watchable. I know because I appropriately lowered mine and kept watching. It is a good pairing of two quite different actors, also at very different points in their careers, allowing them to create two interesting disparate fun characters. I just felt the story did the characters potential more of a disservice than a benefit. This pairing could have yielded much better given the right script. One last note to casting director, though both Kim Bassinger and Matt Bomer have a kind of star power, she is plain wrong, plus terrible, here and he is way too opposite the type of a hit man.