The Nice Guys: potential not reached

Rating: 6/10 (22 October 2016)

The Nice Guys glimmers towards moments of excellence, especially towards the beginning, but ultimately as the credits rolled I felt disappointed.
The first 25 minutes of the film, focused on introducing the 2 main characters, played by Ryan Gosling and a fairly wooden Russell Crowe, is hilarious. The characters are refreshingly satirical and interestingly presented, but as the film progresses the formula for each character becomes tiring: Ryan Gosling is unreliable, often drunk and a bit dainty, Russel Crowe is violent, sinister but has a much more soft and noble side. Every joke in the film is just based around these attributes. By the 1 hour mark I was getting sick of the same sort of material being reused and by the final act of the film I was considering just turning it off.
The narrative of the film is slightly confusing and hard to follow. It's basically Crowe and Gosling trying to find a missing girl and piece together the 'so called' suicide of a famous Pornstar, but because I kind of got lost towards the beginning about who was who and what was happening I found it hard to be engaged in the story. Just for the record I understand and can follow most films I watch, I genuinely think this film was abnormally difficult to follow. I also think the flow of the movie is poor, like I mentioned the first 25 minutes is brilliantly paced, with violence and humour, and then it sort of slows and jokes become less regular and less funny and the story sort of gets a bit stagnant and then they try to pick it up at the end with a big shoot out but even that was a bit hit and miss. I almost think the writer sort of ran out of ideas after the first act of the film but thought the first part was so good he might as well finish off the story.
Ryan Gosling also has questionable moments in the film: his character often overreacts in feminine ways, screaming in a high pitched voice when something surprising happens and I didn't find it funny, but he kept on doing it. It's just poor acting and really desperate writing, trying to force a laugh from a hyperbolised reaction. Another example of this is at the start of the film when Ryan Gosling's character is caught pants down in a cubicle, he slams the door which swings back round so he stands and his cigarette drops to his lap so recoils in horror and tries to close the door again but it swings back open. The first second of this was funny, but it goes on for 10 more seconds and becomes really slapstick, which just ruins the humour of the original joke. Ryan Gosling's character also has a daughter who manages to worm her way into the film and I felt like her character really wasn't needed, she sort of gets annoying and though she has a funny moment here or there, I felt like her tagging along on all the missions kind of weighs the two main characters down.
Overall, watch the first 30 minutes and turn it off, you'll only be wasting an hour of your life if you carry on watching. It's not consistently funny enough to be a god comedy, or intense enough to be a good action film, it sort of floats in the limbo of titles I will forget and probably never re-watch.
Rik