This month marks the five-year anniversary of The Nice Guys, Shane Black’s ‘70s-set buddy caper starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as a private eye and hired goon, respectively, who team up to solve a mystery. It’s a deeply cynical, ceaselessly funny hard-boiled gem of a movie. The Nice Guys is the kind of proudly unsentimental story where a rock-bottom alcoholic convinces his sober friend to triumphantly start drinking again, rather than the other way around.
In many ways, it’s a vulgar and culturally regressive movie, using its period setting to get away with gleefully unseemly content. But in other ways, it’s subtly forward-thinking, contriving a labyrinthine, Chinatown-esque plot in which government bureaucrats and corporate executives are all pure evil, while porn producers and sex workers are righteous political heroes.
And unlike other vintage throwbacks, The Nice Guys mixes its romanticization of the past with the counterbalance of depressing realities; sure, Crowe’s character, Jackson Healy, somehow lives above The Comedy Store in all of its Richard Pryor-era glory — but we also glimpse people fistfighting over the gas shortage and choking on the L.A. smog. It presents the ‘70s, not as some glorious ideal, but a dispiriting sneak preview of American degradation.
But at its core, The Nice Guys is a hang-out movie. And, surprisingly, the dude from The Notebook and Cinderella Man have chemistry you could teach in 10th-grade science class. The end of the movie explicitly suggests that this is just the beginning of a series of adventures for this new detective team.
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