The Nice Guys
Spoilers in white, as usual. All my feed-reading friends be warned. I’ve always been a fan of this kind of movies. And by “this kind” I mean the kind of action movies where the main characters are a couple of weirdly matched cops (or similar), they go after something really weird, they have the aid of an […]
Spoilers in white, as usual. All my feed-reading friends be warned.
I’ve always been a fan of this kind of movies.
And by “this kind” I mean the kind of action movies where the main characters are a couple of weirdly matched cops (or similar), they go after something really weird, they have the aid of an even weirder assistant and ultimately the bad guys get caught, hangover wears off and they carry on their disorderly happy lives.
I know this is all very 80s.
I get that.
Inspiration for this movie is explicitly drawn from classics like The Lethal Weapon or Die Hard and I’m ok with that.
After all, the director (and main author) is Shane Black, also author of Lethal Weapon. He doesn’t work much, if you take a look at his bio. You might also know him for the third installation of the Ironman franchise.
So, why am I displeased, you might wanna ask.
Well, it’s not that I am displeased.
Just a little disappointed.
But it’s a sunny day, so I’m gonna start with the good things.
The movie has a good balance between weird and really really weird, between not serious and really really not serious, without resorting to gore to give itself credit. And that’s not banal. I mean, the whole idea of a porn movie being shoot to denounce pollution in 1970s Los Angeles is just too good to be discarded as just weird. It’s genius.
Characters are walking that line, and sometimes they stand, sometimes they fall. Jackson Healy (Russel Crowe‘s grumpy mercenary who ultimately wants to do good) and Holland March (Ryan Gosling‘s private eye going down a bad lane in life) work well as a couple because they are the opposite of what you might expect: while old Crowe is expected to be the cynical worn-off corrupted former cop or something, and young Gosling might be expected to be the good-hearted comical relief, it’s nice to see them developing as being the other way around. Fifteen years young Angourie Rice (daughter of a director and an actress) provides a good support, and you know how much I hate kids on screen. It’s also nice to see a cold-eyed black-wearing killer in something that is not a Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movie (Matt Bomer, here, playing infamous killer John Boy). Unfortunately, the list of characters actually working stops right here. And all of my English speaking friends please don’t be mad and mind that my judgment might be affected by some really really bad dubbing but… my oh my, did Margaret Qualley give a lousy performance. Yaya DaCosta tries to be brilliant, but tries a little too much (and fails). Kim Basinger doesn’t even try. Anything. The best actress in the house might actually be Murielle Telio (porn actress Misty Mountains… yes, those mountains). Keith David and an unrecognizable Beau Knapp also do a decent job, but I’m afraid it’s not enough. I get the feeling, though, that the whole movie was supposed to be a little more like them, and a little less like DaCosta and Bomer. A lot of effort is put on the 70s atmosphere and set-up, and that’s one of the strenght of the movie. Los Angeles seems to come out straight from an old tv series (this one is the first one that comes to my mind, but that’s my childhood speaking) and the soundtrack is one of the strenght of the movie, for sure. Papa was a rolling’ stone, Boogie Wonderland, Jive Talkin’. And not always in the most inappropriate of moments either.
Also, I appreciated the attempt of some Big Lebowski style oniric twists (the bee scene in the car, and Nixon above all).
Still.
Plot comes out too thin, resolution is so fast you scarcely get satisfaction (probably for not seeing anything of the infamous “How Do You Like My Car, Big Boy?” movie). You get neither the triumphant satisfaction of having caught the bad guys, neither the bittersweet knowledge that Detroit’s car companies will not be destroyed. Basinger’s monologue about “what’s good for Detroit is good for LA as well” is probably supposed to be satire, but it’s delivered in such a bad way, and the character has such a thin impact on screen, that it’s completely insignificant. And the character you were following more as a villain (Tally) doesn’t get an ending line.
So, more that a disappointment, I get the feeling that this movie was just a wasted opportunity. Pity. We’ll see how they do in The Bad Guys 2. Because I get the distinct feeling we’ll get one, regardless if we liked this one or not.