"The Nice Guys" is more than just a "nice" way to spend a couple hours.

Rating: 8/10 (21 May 2016)

I'm really excited about this one! Sometimes I'm concerned that the movies I reference in my reviews may be too old or too obscure to really help the reader understand the point I'm making, but never before have I come across a group of movies that represent the movie I'm reviewing so remarkably well, or that are so surprisingly well connected to each other! Let's look back at the fall of 1997. Just three weeks apart, two great movies came out which would both go on to receive multiple Oscar nominations and were both set in Los Angeles in the mid-to-late 20th century. "Boogie Nights" dramatized the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley from 1977 to 1984, as shown in the rise and fall (pun intended) of young porn actor Eddie Adams, a.k.a. "Dirk Diggler" (played by a rising star named Mark Wahlberg). This movie is notable for its excellent screenplay, terrific acting from a fantastic cast (which included Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy and then relative unknowns like Luis GuzmÃ¡n, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Don Cheadle) â€“ and for the film's realistic portrayal of late 70s' and early 80s' L.A. "L.A. Confidential" had come out three weeks earlier and painted an equally vivid and nuanced picture of the City of Angels in 1953, complete with government corruption which involved a character played by Kim Basinger. Fast forward to 2014. The Oscar-nominated "Inherent Vice" tells the story of a private eye (Joaquin Phoenix) who is investigating a case involving multiple missing persons in 1970 L.A. That movie was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who had also written and directed "Boogie Nights". The darkly comedic 2016 film "The Nice Guys" (R, 1:56) has a private eye looking for multiple missing persons, while uncovering connections to the porn industry AND government corruption in 1970s Los Angeles AND a character played by Kim Basinger is an important part of the plot. Boom! So, are those some really cool connections, or is it just me? Oh. Just me. Alrighty then. I'll just review the movieÂ… The title characters in "The Nice Guys" areÂ… kind of nice, relatively speakingÂ… when you understand that they do some not-so-nice jobs. Jackson Healy (Oscar winner Russell Crowe) is muscle for hire. He beats people up (or worse) for money, but he's relatively polite when he does it and he feels kind of bad about it. (Well, he feels that he's cut out for more than, say, roughing up a guy whose messing around with a client's teenage daughter, and he wishes that he were doing something different.) Holland March (past Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling) is a private eye who seems to make most of his money half-heartedly investigating far-fetched missing persons claims by little old ladies. He's very polite in dealing with his clients and he's sorta smart, but he's not as tough or skilled as he acts, and he has a real problem with pain and with the sight of blood â€“ especially his own. Regardless, Holland makes a good living and takes good care (financially, if not emotionally) of his teenage daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice). Holly is smarter, tougher... and nicer than Holland, whom she reluctantly "parents" better than he parents her.
Holland is simultaneously investigating an alleged sighting of a porn star named Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio) â€“ two days after she was supposedly killed in a car accident â€“ while also looking for an even younger woman named Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who is a protest organizer, who may have appeared in "an experimental film" with Misty Mountains, and who definitely does NOT want to be found. Jackson, on the other hand, has been hired by Amelia to get this PI named Holland March off her trail. This situation leads to an inauspicious first meeting between Jackson and Holland, followed by an auspicious second meeting when they decide to join forces and use their respective talents to find out what's actually going on. You see, Holland has recently received an unwelcomed visit from a couple of thugs (Beau Knapp and Keith David) who demand to know where Amelia is, and then people who are connected to Amelia and/or Missy start dropping dead at an unnatural rate. Our titular "nice guys" eventually meet a Justice Department employee (Kim Basinger, an Oscar winner for "L.A. Confidential") who hires the pair to find Amelia, just as they discover that a Mafioso (Matt Bomer) from New York is in L.A. looking for them â€“ and he ain't interested in talking. With Holly forcing her way into the equation to help her dad and his new partner, it's a race against time to find Amelia and figure out who's killing her acquaintances (and why) before those really not-so-nice guys catch up with the two relatively nice guys.
"The Nice Guys" is a quirky, darkly comedic and intriguing whodunit. The script, by Shane Black (who also wrote "Iron Man 3", "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang", "The Long Kiss Goodnight", "The Last Boy Scout" and the original "Lethal Weapon") and newcomer Anthony Bagarozzi, is intricate, but not hard to follow, and contains smart and very funny dialog and situations (including great tie-ins to TV's "The Waltons" and President Richard Nixon), plus a mystery that's engaging but suffers from an awkward final resolution which feels forced. Besides co-writing, Black (who also directed "Iron Man 3") directs this film with a good feel for pace, tension and comic timing, while his very talented cast (especially Gosling, Crowe and Rice) really brings it all together. While similar in content to those other three films mentioned earlier, this one is closest in tone and style to "Inherent Vice", but is more accessible and less flawed. "The Nice Guys" is more than just a "nice" way to spend a couple hours â€“ it's a pretty damn entertaining one. "A-"