Film still of The Nice Guys © Daniel McFadden
The Nice Guys, a lesson in cool from Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe
US screenwriter and master of action cinema Shane Black, who brought us the scripts of Lethal Weapon (1987), The Last Boy Scout (1992) and Last Action Hero (1989), presented his first feature film (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) Out of Competition in 2005. Eleven years later, he’s back with The Nice Guys, a buddy movie starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as a couple of crazy cops.
In 1970s Los Angeles, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe don their detective suits to investigate the alleged suicide of a starlet. Their eccentric enquiries uncover a conspiracy involving some very high up individuals…
In The Nice Guys, Shane Black offers us a madcap comedy, “a mixture of black humour and drama with a wild style”, midway between an action movie and a slapstick cops and robbers sketch. In a series of chaotic scenes, the renowned screenwriter shows his perfect understanding of comic register by exploiting both situation comedy and biting wit. He entrusts the exercise to Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe whose complicity, both on the set and on the screen, drives the hilarious momentum of the film. Against a retro background set in the 70s, the film plunges us back into a world where our heroes are allowed to get away with everything, except political correctness.
The only problem, if you could call it that, was that Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe ruined so many takes because they couldn’t stop making each other laugh.
The Nice Guys follows on from L’Arme Fatale, and in particular from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where Shane Black proved himself to be an outstanding director of buddy movies, a genre in which he excels.
