"The Nice Guys"

By Matt Duncan

Coastal View News

This is a strange movie. I walked into the theater, and there was a preview on for a new Dinesh D’Souza movie explaining how Hillary Clinton is part of a massive conspiracy to enslave us, or something like that (for a while I couldn’t tell whether this movie was supposed to be a satire). That was followed by a preview for a bizarre-looking new Oliver Stone movie starring Nicolas Cage, which was followed by a few other Twilight-Zone-feeling-inducing previews. I thought, “Am I in the right theater?”

But then after two more hours it all made sense. Well, it made sense in that nothing over the past two hours and 10 minutes made a lot of sense. Not necessarily in a bad way. “The Nice Guys” is strange in a charming, almost “The Big Lebowski” sort of way (though that’s too much of a compliment by association, I think). But it is strange.

It’s the 70s. It’s L.A. Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) breaks arms and bashes skulls for a living—basically, his job is to “send messages” to creeps, lowlifes, and really, anyone he gets paid to bash. Holland March (Ryan Gosling) is a highly unreliable, alcoholic private investigator, who makes a lot of his money by doing things like helping a senile old woman find her dead husband that she forgot died years ago.

Healy and March get tangled up because they are both looking for Amelia (Margaret Qualley). At first Healy gets paid to rough up March to get him to stop looking for Amelia, but then a couple of tough guys come and rough up Healy for having something to do with Amelia, and that pisses Healy off, so he starts looking for Amelia, too. Healy thinks he might as well ask March for help, so, hours removed from the original beating, they start working together. Yeah, it’s complicated.

It turns out Amelia has been hanging out with a bunch of porn stars. Actually, she may be a porn star herself. Or maybe she is just a naïve activist who, oddly enough, uses porn as a vehicle for her political message (March rightly queries her about the wisdom of making a porn about the plot.). At any rate, Amelia is around, sort of, but she keeps running away and thinks her mom is trying to kill her. See, her mom is the head of the Department of Justice, which of course Amelia hates because it means mom is “the man” and part of a vast oppressive capitalist conspiracy to do something super nefarious, including kill Amelia and her friends because they (a) do porn, (b) might expose her as a fraud, (c) might embarrass her, or (d) all of the above.

Healy and March can’t keep their heads around this whole thing (especially March, who is drunk all the time). Luckily they have March’s preteen daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice), by their side. She is sensible and organized, and knows how to drive a car. So she ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

This giant web of sleaze and corruption ends up extending pretty far, not just to the porn and private investigator industries, but also to government and big business outfits. Healy and March end up being, by comparison, the nice guys—just hoping they don’t finish last.

Again, “The Nice Guys” is strange. It is strange because it is a real mishmash of genres, styles, types of humor, and many other things. One moment it is ultra realistic, and the next a giant honeybee is riding in the back seat. But strangeness is an asset for this movie. It makes it just offbeat enough to mask some of the more conventional, cheesy (in a bad way), and potentially tiresome aspects of this movie.

This mask would have been an entirely too flimsy disguise if it weren’t for the charisma of the cast. All three stars—Crowe, Gosling, and Rice—are so easy to watch. Especially Gosling. He is hilarious in an inept yet clever way. He makes a thoroughly goofy character somehow seem cool.

All of this feels sort of like a scam. The plot is silly (and clichéd), the script is pretty uneven, there is no stylistic unity, and only a certain percentage of the jokes land. Yet, by shear stroke of personality, we get drawn in.

Whatever. I kind of liked it.