The Nice Guys – Review

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WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

LA Private detective Holland March (Ryan Gosling) has been hired to find a missing young woman with links to the LA porn industry – and with friends in high places.

Those friends in high places don’t want her found and they dispatch heavyweight mob enforcer Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) to stop him.

But soon, Healy discovers that there are other people trying to find the same woman and decides to team up with March to find her first, to save her from them.

With the help of March’s young daughter Holly (Angourie Rice), they start digging around in the murky worlds of underground porn, the motor industry, highly skilled assassins and political corruption, to try to find the woman and reveal the scandal she was trying to expose when she went into hiding.

WHAT’S IT LIKE?

Shane Black returns with an odd-couple LA-underworld comedy-crime caper, in the vein of his 2005 hit Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, with similarly entertaining chemistry between the buddies at its centre.

Ryan Gosling in particular, but Russell Crowe too, deliver highly creditable comic performances from actors better known for darker fare.

Black too is sizzling with the snappy one-liners of the dialogue and some suitably well choreographed – and often surprising – action sequences.

But the multi-layered plot becomes weighed down by its own complexity, most of the supporting  characters seem to have come from a tick-box villain-kit and the fights, at times, are almost so violent that you can’t believe it’s got away with a 15 certificate.