The Nice Guys (2016, Shane Black) (Patreon)

58/100

Something snapped into place for me—rather belatedly—during The Nice Guys: I have trouble with broad comedies built around a convoluted detective story. Ask my brain to process anarchic and methodical at the same time and it belches smoke, I guess; maybe I get too wrapped up in following the plot to laugh. That would explain why I was twice bored out of my skull by Inherent Vice (to such an extent that I couldn't even think of anything to write about it either time), and why I always lose interest in The Big Lebowski about halfway through (though I love the first half so much that it's still a quasi-favorite). Filtering this mental block through the Coens is instructive, actually, as Burn After Reading is even harder to follow yet I'm in stitches start to finish; that's likely because its jokes are all rooted in narrative intricacy—the uproarious final scene is entirely about J.K. Simmons' C.I.A. honcho struggling to grasp what's happened—whereas Lebowski's humor is largely tangential to its story, and thus not amplified by close attention to what's going on. No doubt there are exceptions to this thesis that haven't yet occurred to me and will undermine it, but the sudden rush of comprehension still felt soothing.

Actually, one such exception might be Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I quite liked and vaguely remember as fitting the above description. (Saw it twice, but not since 2006.) Because I recently watched The Last Boy Scout, that, instead, became my primary Shane Black reference point; the two films are rife with similarities, most notably Willis/Gosling's contentious relationship with a precocious adolescent daughter. What's more, The Nice Guys indulges in some Tony Scott-level overkill that I don't recall marring Black's directorial debut. Four years ago, I turned this film off after 10 minutes, and I now see why: While porn star Misty Mountains' death sets the plot in motion, the manner of said death—her car smashing through the house of a teenage boy who happens to be admiring her centerfold at that very moment, and finds her sprawled topless on the wreckage muttering what turns out to be a cryptic clue to the big conspiracy—is just needlessly, unamusingly hyperbolic, exactly the kind of thing I disliked in Simpson/Bruckheimer productions. And then the double voiceover narration kicks in (de rigueur for the genre, admittedly, but dully expository here), and then Gosling's character is introduced sitting fully clothed in a bathtub full of water for no apparent reason, and then excuse me, check please, can we get the [mimes writing motion], thank you. 

Turns out those first 10 minutes are the film's weakest, though relapses of tedious bombast (e.g. everything involving Keith David and "Blueface") occur throughout, and my aforementioned feeling of plot twists getting in the way of yuks definitely took hold. Crowe and Gosling make a fine odd-couple team, with the latter in particular performing some first-rate physical comedy—that endless battle with the restroom stall door!—and getting handed the lion's share of Black's choicest lines. (Frame it in the Louvre: "You know who else was just following orders? Hitler.") Angourie Rice, meanwhile, makes a far better pint-sized foil/nuisance/sidekick than did Danielle Harris in Last Boy Scout, though Holly, as written, veers incoherently from tolerant to moralistic according to the demands of the moment. I'd have preferred to see the finale's laborious gun battle and rooftop fistfight replaced by additional creative rug-pulls along the lines of Holly throwing what turns out to be stone-cold coffee in a baddie's face (thereby transforming The Big Heat into The Big Chill), but that's just my usual quixotic wish for even offbeat mainstream fare to be even more suicidally indifferent to commercial prospects. (No guarantee of success, in any case—the killer-bee dream sequence didn't really work for me at all, though I admire it in theory.) All in all, a decent diversion. I'll even give Black a pass for needle-dropping "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" in a film set in late 1977.