The Nice Guys Review

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling have no obvious reason to work as a double act and work beautifully. Crowe plays Jackson Healy heavy and tired, a man who hurts people for money and has started to feel it in his knees, while Gosling plays Holland March as a functioning disaster whose physical comedy is the real surprise of the film, from the bathroom stall where he tries to hold a gun, a cigarette and a magazine at once, to the high strangled shriek he produces on finding a body.

Angourie Rice takes a third of the picture away from both of them as March's daughter, who keeps turning up where a thirteen year old should not be. The 1977 Los Angeles of smog alerts, porn parties and auto industry lobbying is built with real affection, and Philippe Rousselot lights it in brown and gold. The mystery is the weak part. A conspiracy about catalytic converters and a Detroit executive gets resolved by exposition at a motor show, and the hired killer chasing them has no interior at all, so the last twenty minutes swap the loose rhythm of the middle for a conventional shootout that Shane Black stages without any of the invention he brings to two men arguing in a car.