The Nice Guys (2016)

Russell Crowe is the best thing in The Nice Guys. That sounds like faint praise, but I mean it sincerely. Watching him here, this big, lumbering bruiser of a man playing hired muscle with a surprising streak of weariness running through him, reminded me quite a lot of his work in the neo-noir crime world of 1950s LA. There's a physical authority to him that very few actors can pull off, and he doesn't waste it. It's the kind of performance that makes you wish the film around it were a little sharper.

Because The Nice Guys is good. Genuinely good in stretches. But it isn't quite great, and that gap between what it is and what it could have been is where most of my mixed feelings live.

The setting helps enormously. Los Angeles in the late 1970s is rendered with real affection here, all wide lapels, shag carpeting and petrol fumes. The cars alone are worth the price of admission. There's something deeply satisfying about watching a proper muscle car creak through sun-baked LA streets, and the soundtrack leans right into that era in the best way possible. It's not just wallpaper either. The period atmosphere genuinely shapes the mood and gives the film a loose, slightly seedy energy that suits the story.

And the story is, well, it's a neo-noir mystery. A missing girl, a conspiracy with threads running in too many directions, bodies turning up at inconvenient moments. You know the shape of it before it begins. That's not necessarily a problem. Genre comfort is a real thing, and there's pleasure to be had in watching familiar pieces arranged by confident hands. Shane Black clearly knows his way around this sort of material, and there are sequences that crackle with a genuinely sharp comic timing.

Ryan Gosling, for his part, is doing something quite specific and quite committed as the bumbling private eye who makes up the other half of this odd pairing. He's playing comic relief with real commitment, and it lands more often than it doesn't. The chemistry between him and Crowe is the engine the whole thing runs on, and when the two of them are bouncing off each other, the film earns its laughs properly.

But occasionally funny is different from consistently funny, and The Nice Guys too often coasts in the stretches between its better moments. The plot, as it thickens, becomes more convoluted than complex. There's a difference. Complex plots reward your attention and feel satisfying when the pieces click together. Convoluted ones just accumulate complications until you're following along on faith rather than genuine engagement. By the third act, I found myself doing quite a bit of the latter.

It's the sort of film that's easy to enjoy in the moment and harder to argue for afterwards. I had a decent time watching it. I laughed when it was funny, I appreciated the period craft, I enjoyed Crowe's work throughout. But I never felt fully invested in where it was all going, and the mystery at the centre never quite grabbed me the way the best of the genre can.

Three and a half stars feels right. A film I'd recommend to anyone who likes their buddy comedies with a bit of noir grime on them, and especially to anyone who's been missing Russell Crowe doing what Russell Crowe does best. Just don't go in expecting the story to hold together under any serious scrutiny. Take it for what it is, and there's a decent evening's entertainment here. Expect more than that, and you might find it falls a little short.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-06-13

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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