Critics reviews

A diverting entertainment, funny and just sleazy enough. Kind of a waste of Matt Bomer though.

It's worthless, not that funny, far more enjoyable than High-Rise, and does nothing at all to justify its existence — a traditional saving grace of the movies.

[Gosling and Crowe's] easy rapport aside, Black's achievement is to create a palpably dangerous onscreen world spacious enough to cultivate both sadism and tragedy – including at least one truly shocking death – as well as the kinds of visual and verbal non sequiturs that launched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into the comic stratosphere.

It may well be ‘about' the sexual corruption of today's kids in a world where they grow up too fast, where adults can no longer rely on the birds and bees – a theme explicitly stated by Crowe in his opening voice-over, then later by Gosling when he sighs that "The days of ladies and gentlemen are over". This is interesting, and shows that the film has substance – but no-one watches films for their hidden themes, and Nice Guys is also madly entertaining.

Black no doubt intended his meandering movie to feel lazy—but certainly not *this* lazy? Set in a scare-quote 70s LA whose social context feels for the most part unconsidered, the neo-noir is content to coast on head-slapping smart-ass humor—kids say naughty things, there's a fair share of slapstick violence, and Hitler seems to come up a lot in the banter between the leads.

Though it lacks the constant autocritique ofKiss Kiss Bang Bang, it's still full of hilarious motormouths and shot through with doses of bizarro humor (look out for the Nixon cameo). The Nice Guys is probably a richer experience for an audience familiar with Black's idiosyncrasies, but on the other hand they don't appear in danger of going out of style.

It's blunt, not hilarious, like playing bumper-cars with reality. And though the director tries to give each man equal time, his clumsiness ends up reinforcing Healy's smash-mouth approach. This movie makes you feel like a cartoon cat being slapped around by a mouse.

One of the pleasures of The Nice Guys are the countless small ways in which Black upends expectations, like emphasizing his heroes' cravenness in the face of serious danger or pulling a twist on the familiar action-thriller shot of men jumping into a pool from a hotel balcony. Black knows every trick in the book and he assumes the audience does likewise.

Anyone hoping for the verbal and conceptual excesses of The Long Kiss Goodnight or The Last Boy Scout may be disappointed, despite an outré opening sequence that links violent death, cheesy erotica, and teenage guilt. But Black's odd-couple patter—here injected with period-specific references to The Waltons and Mikhail Baryshnikov—and knack for the occasional gory surprise is enough for a movie to coast on. Gosling and Crowe's comic rapport is a big factor.

The modest pleasures of The Nice Guys lie not in following the wiggy story twists but in watching Gosling and Crowe mix it up and mess everything up. Crowe's Healy gets some of Black and co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi's best, if slickest, lines, particularly in the Philip Marlowe–style voice-over that opens the film: "Love. I was in love once. Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate.

With The Nice Guys, Shane Black never veers too far from the formula he's employed for almost 30 years. Even so, the film feels like a greatest-hits package that checks off all of the writer-director's tics... You could cobble the film together from leftover pages of previous scripts, but it's a testament to the sturdiness of the filmmaker's signature formula that it can still yield solidly entertaining action comedies.

The film manages to maintain a breezy, charming appeal despite its mishmash of tones. Much like Paul Thomas Anderson's great Inherent Vice, Black's vision of burnt-out SoCal crisis isn't about the issues themselves but the flawed people (young and old) grappling with them at the micro-level. "The kids may know too much," as Healey grumbles early on, but they can still teach us how to be nice again.