How entertaining? ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 19 May 2016
A movie review of THE NICE GUYS. |
YouTube review:
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“Look on the bright side. Nobody got hurt,” Holland March (Ryan Gosling)
“People got hurt,” Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe)
“I'm saying, I think they died quickly; so I don't think they got hurt,” Holland March
Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe fumble the shoddy script. Like DEADPOOL, everyone seems so pleased with themselves. A disappointment from the writer of LETHAL WEAPON and THE LAST BOY SCOUT. THE NICE GUYS is far less funny than it thinks it is. The gag rate is high, but the misses outweigh the hits. As the clangers pile up, there would be awkward silences except for the bone-crunching punch sounds and the ear-splitting gunshots.
“People got hurt,” Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe)
“I'm saying, I think they died quickly; so I don't think they got hurt,” Holland March
Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe fumble the shoddy script. Like DEADPOOL, everyone seems so pleased with themselves. A disappointment from the writer of LETHAL WEAPON and THE LAST BOY SCOUT. THE NICE GUYS is far less funny than it thinks it is. The gag rate is high, but the misses outweigh the hits. As the clangers pile up, there would be awkward silences except for the bone-crunching punch sounds and the ear-splitting gunshots.
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Recent anti-hero gumshoe dark comedies: INHERENT VICE, THE NICE GUYS and WAR ON EVERYONE, the latter only really satisfies. These films are littered with previous movie references, from CHINATOWN and THE LONG GOODBYE to the buddy action comedies of the 1980s and 90s. The nods do not get annoying with VICE and WAR thanks to a determination to side-step cliché. However, writer-director Shane Black here harks back to his own work. The opening of a car ploughing through a house reminds of BOY SCOUT and the gratuitous female nudity, and death following, is LETHAL WEAPON’s commencement. Also like the latter, set in the world of adult entertainment, lends an unsettling seediness to proceedings, but the one-sided gendered baring here reeks of misogyny. A shame as the female characters are not poorly drawn.
March and Healy are of course different personas, but given sad backstories that are cursorily explored and hardly resonating. We are meant to feel sympathy as the world around them gets ever more violent. Their characters do not get a chance to breathe, as they opt for a continual stream of glib observations. It’s the equivalent of that guy at a party who attempts to engage with jests but tries too hard.
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Healy and March, the former a bruiser for hire, the latter an ex-cop private eye, search for a missing young woman, Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley), who everybody they come across in Los Angeles, 1977, are searching for. There is an obvious conspiracy surrounding Amelia, but THE NICE GUYS is no L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. When the revelations come, you will probably shrug your shoulders. Minutes expended to give meaning to the plot, are subsumed under substandard jokes littering the runtime in keeping with the mounting body count.
Undoubted charisma is on display from the leads and support (Kim Basinger, Keith David, Yaya DaCosta, etc.). Having March’s 13-year old daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice), in the team, shifts the bromance to MY TWO DADS, adding a refreshing dynamic to the crime genre, but let’s not forget KICK-ASS already did this.
School report verdict: Must try less hard.
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