Shane
Black was 23 when he wrote Lethal Weapon
in 1987. He then wrote the next three Lethal Weapon movies, a franchise that provided an
original take on the Detective Buddy genre.
Shane Black then wrote The Last Boy Scout, Last
Action Hero, and The Long Kiss
Goodnight. We may now feel rather
superior to some of these movies, but I do not
think their success was based on lowest common denominator appeal. There was some original and witty writing in
there. But Black disappeared after The Long Kiss Goodnight. The booze got to him.
These
seven years in the wilderness were
followed in 2005 by his writer/directorial debute, Kiss
Kiss Bang Bang. This title had
previously been used for a 1970’s British comic thriller novel and a Pauline Kael film
crit collection, but it nicely sums up the genre Black was keen not to subvert
exactly but to view from another angle.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a post-modernist/buddy detective/action
comedy that gave Val Kilmer a rare chance to show his comedic chops and matched
him well with Robert Downey Jnr, kick-starting
Downey’s return to the screen after his own sojourn in the wilderness, for which
many thanks. The film was largely a critical, if not
financial, success and prompted director Jon Favreau to call Downey when Iron Man came
around. Black was recruited as the writer-director of Iron
Man 3, widely considered to be best written
of its kind – and one that has taken over a billion dollars at the box office.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was smart, fast and fun and Black’s new comedy action movie, The Nice Guys, is also smart, fast and fun, even if not quite in the same league (for me) as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It also offers us (mis)matched buddy detectives, this time Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling.
The Nice Guys is set in 1977 LA. The time and place are crucial. It is before cell or mobile phones, the curse
of modern thriller writers (save of course for The Departed which, even though adapted from the a pre-mobile Infernal Affairs trilogy of Hong Kong thrillers,
brilliantly incorporated the devices). The 70’s soundtrack nails the ambiance. It plot also involves the burgeoning porn
industry that was still seen by some as glamorous. Do you remember the critical/moral confusion
that greeted Deep Throat?
The
script for The Nice Guys has been
hanging around for a long time, and it seems that Ryan Gosling came across it
and wanted to be in it. Gosling, as Holland
March, plays directly against his Drive persona and gives us some of the
humour he showed in Crazy, Stupid Love. Holland is basically an incompetent, often drunken and sometimes unprofessional Private
Eye, recently widowed and bringing up his
daughter Holly, a 13
year old with smarts. Black wrote other such precocious kids into The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero and
Iron Man 3. Fortunately Angourie
Rice as Holly plays
it well, adroitly avoiding the swampy yuck factor.
Crowe,
as Jackson Healy, is essentially freelance muscle, but
has a rudimentary (if maybe delusional) moral code, preferring to lean on
predators, particularly those who pick on young girls. For him violence has a kind of purity. He looks fondly back to a time when he ‘thought I made difference, I was useful’ as he tackled
and beat up a crazy gunman in a diner. Gosling
and Crowe work very well together.
As the
film begins Holland is trailing a young woman as part of a job. Jackson mistakenly thinks he is stalking
her, and attempts to ‘dissuade’ him, with prejudice that is very painful if not
extreme. They eventually join forces
however, wading through blood and sleaze, porn and corporate corruption at the behest
of Kim Basinger’s Chief Justice.
Gosling
and Crowe generate enough warmth and the script enough humour to hold us and
carry us forward. The action set pieces are well put together - but if Shane
Black couldn’t do that by now something would be very wrong. There
is, by the way, a joke about Detroit at the end of the movie that took the
whole film to set up. People from
Detroit may not appreciate it, and I may have been the only person in the
cinema who laughed out loud, but hey!
The
movie pretends to be hard-boiled, but we know it is soft hearted, though a lot
of people end up very dead. Holland and
Jackson are both trying to do the right thing, to be the nice guys, even if they
sometimes need young Holly to be their moral compass. There is an obvious and deliberate
opportunity for a sequel, and it really looks as Gosling and Crowe enjoyed
playing together. This is certainly not
American Hustle, but I recommend it
even if I will have forgotten it by the end of the summer. And if there is a sequel?
I think I will be there.
