The Nice Guys

Shane Black keeps the detective plot deliberately loose. The investigation keeps hitting dead ends; the pleasure is watching two men fail, not a case being solved. If you track clues expecting each to pay off, the script reads as careless, but the mess is the design. The second defining decision is Holly, the thirteen year old played by Angourie Rice. She is not sidelined but inside the investigation, in the room for the ugliest scenes, and that is where the comedy and the discomfort collide. Russell Crowe takes the heavy, quiet half while Ryan Gosling takes the falling, screaming, fainting half. The look was a refusal too. Shooting his first digital feature, cinematographer Philippe Rousselot turned down period lenses and nineteen seventies camera technique, arguing that the sets, wardrobe, dialogue and music would evoke the decade on their own. The script has an odd history as well: Black built these characters in a very different 2001 draft, and the material later became a sixty four page television pilot that a network standards department killed. Shooting happened in Atlanta, not Los Angeles. Good if you want two incompetents wearing each other down more than a solved case. Not for a viewer who will find a child walking through violence and pornography hard to sit with.