Shane black gives us an incredibly average neo-noir buddy cop comedy

Rating: 5/10 (31 May 2016)

Shane Black, the writer/director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, returns with another neo-noir, buddy cop comedy called The Nice Guys. The Nice Guys takes place in 1977 Los Angeles, and after a bizarre opening scene that will only fully make sense until the end of the film, the film introduces us to one of the main protagonists, Jackson Healy. (played by Russell Crowe) Who is just low-level muscle for hire, who one day is hired by a shy paranoid girl called Amelia, (played by Margaret Qualley) to beat up a bumbling private investigator, Holland March (played by Ryan Gosling) that is on her tail. Later on Healy is attacked by two thugs that demand to know Amelia's whereabouts, which Healy does not know. After Healy escapes the thugs he goes and tries to find Holland March in order that they can team up and find Amelia and figure out what's going on.
The Nice Guys is a mixture of a neo-noir mystery and a buddy cop comedy, but the film is works much better as a comedy then as a mystery, a lot of the jokes are really good with great deliveries on the punch-lines and some solid physical humor to boot. But even though the jokes on a hole are pretty good some of them do fall flat, and the film doesn't do a very good job of keeping the comedy going in a continuous flow, it sort of just comes in these short bursts. But the comedy on a hole as I said earlier is really good, so there's no real reason to get nitpick it, especially when there are so many big problems I have with the film mainly the plot. The plot itself is pretty generic, if you've seen any neo-noir film you've basically seem The Nice Guys, but not only is it generic, it's lazy. The majority of the time the way the plot is furthered is by the characters accidentally stumbling across the thing they needed, or some random character coming over and telling the protagonists the information they needed to know, very little goes on in the way of actual detective work, which makes for a very obnoxious and dull movie.
But the biggest problem I have with the Nice Guys is that it's not immersive. While I was watching the film I never felt like I was actually in 70s. Compare this to Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, (which is a film set in a similar time period) when you're watching Inherent Vice you feel like you're in the actual era its placing you in. All of the characters mannerisms and the smallest things in the background help contribute to this feeling, and it makes the film so much better and enjoyable. I never got that from The Nice Guys. Which was a serious let done, the lack of immersion makes the film feel tedious and just fake. Overall I'm split on The Nice Guys, on one hand there are some funny jokes and solid performances and on the other the plot is unoriginal and weak, and the film is not immersive. I guess it's worth looking into if it looks like something you'd be into, but you wouldn't really be missing anything if you didn't see The Nice Guys.