Review: THE NICE GUYS

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! 

3 stars

Mini Review:

A bumbling buddy detective movie where people get shot at, maimed, their bones broken, run over by cars, chased by baddies, and generally bashed up, with the buddies escaping by the skin of their teeth, by inches, by sheer will-power, by mistakes… It’s witty, sarcastic, and wholly funny. A wild ride for two hours that will keep you guffawing at the sheer audacity of events panning out!

Main Review:

‘Does detective work pay?’ ‘No, but it gets you a cool ad.’

‘You didn’t discover the dead body, you fell on it!’

‘Dad! There are whores and stuff here!’

Before you are disgusted at me giving away all the funny lines of the film, let me tell you that these were just some of the witty writing that you will experience without falling off your seats. There’s more. So much more. It is a wild roller-coaster of a ride set in the extravagant seventies where the cars were long and the women long-legged and the men flirted with danger and drugs and drinks…

The movie is daring. It flouts common sense and convention. The two detectives team up to find a client and the two hour trip takes you through sleaze, silliness and situations that are jaw-droppingly unbelievable. What raises the cool quotient of the film is the number of times you say, ‘Oh mah gawd!’, ‘What just happened?!’ or plain, ‘What the…!’ simply because you don’t expect to see what you saw. You have seen Tarantino kill people violently in his film. But here when people die, it is random and with guffaw-inducing surprise.

The nudity is so incidental and hilarious, you don’t think too much of it. So when Russell Crowe covers up an exposed leg you smile broadly in the darkness of the theater and remember how Ryan Gosling strips to chase the mermaids…

Have I gone barmy? Perhaps. Perhaps not. One thing’s for sure, you have never seen Ryan Gosling in a role such as this one and Russell Crowe too. They’re funny. Very. And they rule the scene in the middle of a ‘die-in’ protest group.

(This review appears on nowrunning dot com)