Is the nice guys on netflix uk

In a mainstream cinema landscape that often seems driven by concession – to the studio, the investors, the marketers, the distributors, certain demographics, the foreign market, the domestic market, the Stone Cutters – there are few things more satisfying than seeing a populist filmmaker getting to do exactly what he wants on a large canvas.

A private eye investigates the apparent suicide of a fading porn star in 1970s Los Angeles and uncovers a conspiracy.

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Shane Black’s 2016 action-comedy The Nice Guys hits Netflix thanks to a recent profile boost that happened in the wake of the streamer’s expensive tentpole raucousfest The Gray Man. Both feature witty performances from Ryan Gosling, and that’s pretty much where the comparison ends, since The Nice Guys is uproarious while The Gray Man merely Has Its Moments. Black’s movie is lightning in a bottle – his and Anthony Bagarozzi’s zesty script is exquisitely delivered by Gosling and co-star Russell Crowe – and prompts one to wonder if we should pine for a sequel or simply treasure this terrifically funny outing as a standalone gem.

THE NICE GUYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Los Angeles, 1977. Gas is in short supply and lines are long to fill the tank and people are choking each other over it and smog is the silent killer. One adolescent boy is happy, though, because he managed to successfully sneak into his sleeping parents’ room and procure a gentleman’s magazine from beneath the bed. He ogles Misty Mountains’ naked form in the centerfold just as a powder blue Camaro smashes through his house, and when he investigates the scene, Misty Mountains’ naked form is dying in his yard. He pulls off his pajama top and covers her up. He’s a good kid.

This plot will thick – and boy howdy, will it thick – but not until we meet our protagonist oafs. One is Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), an aging bruiser-for-hire who’ll charge you, I dunno, 50 bucks or so to get someone offa yer case. He’s very persuasive with a set of brass knuckles. He’s also persuasive without them. He wears a wide-lapeled leather jacket that’s about the same shade of Misty Mountains’ Camaro, and switches between aviator shades and reading glasses. He has a word-of-the-day calendar suggesting that, at some point, he realized he needed to exercise his mind as much as his muscle, but he also carries enough paunch to suggest he may soon go to pot. “Sometimes I feel OK about things,” he says in hardboiled voiceover. “Not often.”

The other guy is Holland March (Ryan Gosling), who we meet in the bathtub. Wearing a suit. Submerged in water. Hungover. I think this illustrates that he’s slippery. Also, pathetic. “You will never be happy” is written on his thumb. “My folks told me to reach for the stars. My pals on the force told me to reach for the brass ring,” he says in hardboiled voiceover. “Then my wife died, and I reached for whatever came in a gallon and cost a buck-fifty.” He’s a private dick. He’s often publicly drunk. His daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice), is 13, and you get the sense that without her, he’d’ve drowned in his own vomit by now, or been killed, or be, I dunno, a government arms dealer or something awful like that. She humors his alcoholism by driving him around in his vintage jalopy Benz convertible. His clients are more like marks – old ladies who can barely see but whose checks don’t bounce.

The plot here is amazing. Not for its amusing convolution, period detail or sharply honed political commentary, but because it puts these two guys together. March is hired to find a woman named Amelia (Margaret Qualley); Healy is hired to persuade March not to find her. When they meet for the first time, Healy busts March’s arm, and it’s the beginning of a bee-yoo-tiful friendship. They have a lot in common – they’re depressed, lonely, in a line of work where you’re always getting guns pointed at ya. They’re both susceptible to Holly’s sweetheart charms; it helps that she’s smarter than both of them. The guys soon realize the Amelia case is much broader and deeper than their paltry paycheck pieces of it. In fact, it involves the U.S. Justice Dept., the Detroit Big Three and the porno-film industry. NEATO. If they manage to not get killed, whether by nefarious forces or their own stupidity, it’ll be a miracle.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I do not make this comparison lightly: Crowe and Gosling are a great action-comedy duo on par with De Niro and Grodin in Midnight Run. The Nice Guys also makes for a great Shane Black double feature alongside Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Performance Worth Watching: You’d have to point a gun at me to make me choose between Gosling and Crowe. (Chk-CHCKK) IT’S GOSLING. He indulges the type of inspired slapstick comedy we never expected from the guy who played the biggest badass in modern cinema history, Driver in Drive. He plays the most inspired greased weasel this side of Ratso Rizzo.

Memorable Dialogue: The whole script is like this:

March: Look on the bright side. Nobody got hurt.

Healy: A lot of people got hurt.

March: I’m saying they died quickly though, so I don’t think they got hurt.

Sex and Skin: A fair amount of female full-frontal not far removed from the content of soft 1970s porn.

Our Take: The Nice Guys is spiky and delightful, its variety of entertaining elements holding up well under a rewatch: the prickly-yet-affectionate Crowe-Gosling interactions, the loopy plot, the colorful supporting characters, Rice’s exquisitely modulated precociousness and balance of worldliness and naivete in her role as the movie’s moral heart and soul. Rice is the scene thief, the whipsmart sweetie between two weary, bitter and wounded men who are precariously close to being beyond redemption; the hope she represents keeps their misanthropy in check.

The key to the film’s success? Black tightly swaddles its mordant tone and carefully nurtures it. It’s dark comedy, but never bleak. His characters are jaded – humanity and America are so, so corrupt – but they veer more toward realism than cynicism. The world may be broken, but it’s not irreparable. The nice guys are sad guys who maybe are a little less sad when they’re working together. Which is quite funny, and kind of sweet, like bickering stepbrothers learning to appreciate each other’s flaws and foibles.

Black’s action sequences are cleverly staged, a quarter-inch from cartoonishness at times, indulgent without being over-the-top, restrained without being mundane: Gosling drunkenly tumbles down a hill, Gosling drunkenly dives into a mermaid tank, Gosling drunkenly chases a film can that rolls and rolls and rolls like the on-top-of-spaghetti meatball, like Tom and Jerry chasing a loose baby across rising and lowering I-beam girders hundreds of feet above the ground, until you start feeling like you’re chasing it too, since it symbolizes The Nice Guys itself, and thank the lord we can actually catch it, so to speak. In fact, the rolling film can of this movie wants to be caught, but it’s not gonna want to be held too tight, since it’s the rare crowdpleaser that’s also eccentric and a little bit irritable in an endearing sort of way.

There’s a chunk of the third act where the loose, rolling marbles of the plot congregate so they may be lined up and sorted, and the screenplay’s comedic edge is dulled – but what am I doing by saying that, other than to nitpick a movie that inspires big belly laughs and employs the catalytic converter as a MacGuffin? It’s about things, things in society that were and still are important (pollution, venality, rebellion against large corporations), but without the value we place on each other, on our relationships with friends and daughters, all the stuff out there in the broken world might not be worth enduring, or fixing.

Our Call: The Nice Guys: Great movie. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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