AnonymousAndy’s review published on Letterboxd:
The Nice Guys aka The Long Kiss Boogie Night aka Slay Misty for Me aka Bomer Badman
The vintage '70s WB logo comes up, Papa Was a Rollin' Stone is queued up and the mood is set accordingly. It's 1977, Los Angeles. Another Jaws is just around the corner. Richard Lewis is headlining over Tim Allen at The Comedy Store (as he should), kids are listening to KISS and Yoo-hoo is still a perfectly cromulent drink. All is well with the world — that is, until an adult film star goes tits up, prompting a pair of fuck-ups to fall ass-backwards into an unusually convoluted case, going down an endless rabbit-hole of pool parties, protests, pornography and political maneuvering along the way.
With respect once again being paid to Brett Halliday's bottomless series of Michael Shayne novels, writer/director Shane Black returns to the very same source that gave his (and Robert Downey Jr.'s) career a much-needed shot in the arm in the mid-2000s, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Boasting another firecracker script meant to emulate the page-turners that inspired it, The Nice Guys also finds young beefcake Ryan Gosling teaming up with a beefeating Russell Crowe — the former being a good sport, playing the fool and paving the way for Ken, while the latter fills the void between his early stardom and exorcising popes or whatever it is he does nowadays — offering the audience copious amounts of vintage buddy cop vibes to offset if not complement the impossibly indecipherable nature of its lush and labyrinthine plot.
It's a well-oiled, hard-boiled affair that feels at once vintage and timeless, recalling an era that — with its performative protestations and tacky decorations littered about — feels eerily akin to the world we live in now, yet resembling precious few of the sorts of movies we're getting nowadays, whether in tone, style or overall quality. The fact that its plot is as tough for the audience to crack as it is for Gosling's character to not simply fall on his face repeatedly is just part and parcel of the experience. Along the way, Shane dazes and confuses us into such a trance that we can only just sit back and marvel as the pitch-perfect period setting does its work and a crew of kids so precocious they could give a hundred Dakota Fannings or Chloë Grace Moretzs a run for their money chow down all that chunky dialogue like so much penny candy. Throw in Keith David throwing down for his biggest beatdown in nearly three decades and Crowe's predilection for punching pedophiles (which had to have made that one buddy of Black's awfully nervous onset) and you're guaranteed to have a pretty nice time hanging with The Nice Guys.
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