Not even Hollywood nostalgia is what it used to be. In the good old days, one could expect Hollywood films attempting to exploit their audience's nostalgia to be set some 15–20 years in the past. Today that number seems ever more distant, so much so that nostalgic films haven’t moved on from the 1980s. The reason for this may perhaps be found in the fact that nostalgia is no longer aimed at audiences so much as the gerontocratic bosses in Hollywood studio offices, for whom the “good old days” usually mean the 1980s or, more likely, the 1970s. Such an impression could be further reinforced by The Nice Guys, an action black comedy from Shane Black, one of the most celebrated screenwriters of 1980s Hollywood action flicks such as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout.
The film, which Black also directed and which was produced by the equally legendary action film producer Joel Silver, is set in 1977 Los Angeles. Its two main protagonists are two men who, each in his own way, try to make a living as private detectives. One of them, Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), isn’t really one – his speciality isn’t investigation so much as using physical force to “persuade” various dodgy types on behalf of his clients to give up certain shady activities linked to naïve youngsters. One such job brings Healy to Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a genuine private detective whose career has been significantly affected by the tragic death of his wife, which leads him to turn to the bottle a bit too often and land in trouble that his teenage daughter (Angourie Rice) frequently has to bail him out of. Healy’s task is to persuade March to drop his search for a young girl, Amelia Kutner (Margaret Qualley), but the problem is that Amelia represents March’s key lead in investigating the death of a porn star, a case launched by her aunt. The mutual confrontation between the two men is temporarily halted by Amelia’s disappearance, which causes the pair to team up on a search that will see them experience numerous bizarre adventures – and have their lives threatened, because by a twist of fate they’ve stirred up a hornets’ nest involving not just the LA underworld and porn demi‑monde, but also a conspiracy touching the US government and pillars of the American economy at the time.
In The Nice Guys it is at times amusing to see how former leading male Hollywood stars, for whom the female audience used to swoon, casually and without complexes carry the burden of advanced years. Crowe, who won over audiences as the half‑naked protagonist of Gladiator, has thus piled on several dozen kilos without any apparent concern, while Gosling, who not so long ago stirred feminine sighs in The Notebook, plays an alcoholic wreck next to whom Liam Neeson – despite his six decades of age – looks like Apollo. Yet as a duo the two work rather well together, though most of the credit for that belongs to Shane Black, who could write “buddy buddy” film scripts blindfolded. Besides the dynamic between the two leads, Black also handles several interesting action scenes well, especially in the dramatic and spectacular finale. Black, on the other hand, is much weaker as a director, and partly responsible here is also a conceptual confusion over whether the aim was to make a macho action flick in the mould of the 1980s, or to pay homage to the “good old” 1970s à la the complex, dark, cynical and often pessimistic post‑Watergate thrillers about lone fighters for justice who usually end up short‑changed in their reckoning with powerful villains. In the case of The Nice Guys, Black leans toward the 1970s in style – that is, in cinematography that is often literally dark, and at times the audience struggles to make out what is actually happening on screen. The Nice Guys, when all is added up and subtracted, with its nostalgic and therefore “politically incorrect” approach, is nevertheless quite a refreshment compared to today’s Hollywood, so for that alone it can be said that it really is… nice.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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