A very Shane Black comedy

Rating: 7/10 (27 May 2016)

Ryan Gosling plays the "world's worst detective" Holland March, and Russell Crowe is Jackson Healey, a mercenary tough guy who's paid to punch paedophiles.
This 1977-set LA story starts with a slightly misjudged visual joke portraying the death of adult movie star named Misty Mountains. When Misty's aunt claims to have seen her niece alive, March is hired to find her. Separately, Healey is hired to stop him by force. A series of convoluted events conspire to bring the mismatched duo together, and off they go on a search for a missing girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley). There are a ton of bad guys standing in the way of their goal, who happens to be the daughter of a sinister VIP from the Department of Justice (Kim Basinger). It's fair to say that March's and Healey's chaotic quest is propelled as much by luck as skill.
Being written and directed by Shane Black, comparisons to Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and Lethal Weapon are inevitable. It's not quite up to the same standard as those scripts – perhaps future instalments might shed light on Healey's backstory and his neurotic need to be "useful", or delve more into the broken home life of March – but there is undeniable pleasure in seeing Black do his thing: banter, pathos, idiocy, lunacy, and old school shootouts. It's probably on a par with The Last Boy Scout, which will do nicely.
Gosling and Crowe are cast subtly against type, playing around with (and against) their ice cool and wounded warrior personas respectively. It's especially effective with Gosling, whose tendency toward stolidity works well in the more deadpan moments. Angourie Rice, playing March's precocious daughter Holly, almost steals the show from the stars. It's a great performance and a great character: she binds these two emotionally stunted men in the way that Murtaugh's family once brought Riggs back from the brink.
The trailers for The Nice Guys have been subtly misleading, presenting the film as a pure knockabout action comedy. Yet Black's skill has always been his ability to combine humour and sincerity. It's refreshing to watch an adult comedy with an intricate (if ridiculous) plot and actual scripted jokes; and one where we're not waiting for the next filmmaker-buddy cameo.
The movie has more in common with the slacker detective pictures of the decade in which it's set – it is faintly reminiscent of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye in its depiction of nihilism and questionable competence. Another touchstone would be Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, although this is the far less detached and humorous film. Similarly, the period is lovingly reincarnated, in part because it doesn't simply revel in the coolness of the time – here's a movie that's happy to eschew the disco and observe the rubbish brownness of late-70s social decline.
The Nice Guys is a welcome return of one of cinema's most reliable and intelligent mainstream filmmakers. Shane Black is a master of toying with genre (he was responsible for Iron Man 3's bonkers twist); and although the buddy genre may be a familiar one, it remains the perfect vehicle for his talents.
Arguably the worst impulse of the modern action movie is excess, and the curse of the modern American comedy is irony. The Nice Guys offers mercifully little of either, which makes it feel both old and new.