Film Review: The Nice Guys (2016)

Shane Black, the testosterone-addled writer/director behind such guys with guns films as Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Last Boy Scout, isn't wholly to blame for this embalmed-in-nostalgia disaster. It's clear he didn't get the memo. No one who has read the memo would have cast Russell Crowe in anything remotely resembling a comedy. I'm positive a memo was sent out to everyone in Hollywood letting them know that Crowe can't do funny in the same way that Donald Trump can't do rational. The proof is the romantic-comedy A Good Year (2006), in which Russ tried to go the full Hugh Grant and ended up doing a career face-plant that registered on the Richter scale. And I`m positive another memo will shortly be doing the rounds in Hollywood letting people know that Ryan Gosling also appears to be comedy-impaired.

The plot, such as it is, has Crowe and Gosling as, respectively, Jackson Healey,an enforcer for hire, and Holland March, a boozy P.I., joining forces to find a missing girl in 1977 Los Angeles. Also along for the ride is Angourie Rice playing March's precocious 13 year-old daughter. The missing girl, Elaine, is somehow involved in both the porn business and a scandal affecting Detroit's automakers. Various people want her dead and are happy to take out anyone looking for her. As you can see, Black repeatedly hit the cliche key on his laptop when he sat down to write this mess. The thin plot is just a rickety framework for a barrage of dead-on-arrival gags and glitzy, extravagant production design that recreates in lurid detail the era that good taste forgot.

Even if Crowe and Gosling were born comics it's hard to imagine them wringing laughs out of this material. A typical gag has March asking Healey, "What do you call those guys without balls?" March is thinking of eunuchs, but Healey wittily replies, "Married?" This would have been a tired gag in 1977, but Black thinks it's so funny he has his duo do another variation of it later on. Adding a precocious kid into the mix just makes things more like a bad sitcom, and when the girl ends up at a porn producer's party the film takes a turn into the unsavory that it never recovers from. None of the actors survive this train wreck. Gosling and Crowe are poor, Rice is awful, and Kim Basinger as an attorney general is...very odd. When she first appeared on screen I wasn't sure what I was looking at. A Pixar creation? A hologram? And then I remembered that some actors now have it in their contracts that they must be digitally altered to look younger. Basinger doesn't look younger, she looks like a replicant auditioning for a Blade Runner sequel.

Shane Black clearly set out to make a guns and gags version of Boogie Nights. The latter film, however, wasn't fixated on period detail and had a laser-sharp focus on character. The Nice Guys is just a collection of bad jokes dressed up in wide lapels and garish colours. And even the action elements are lacking, which is a shocker in a Shane Black film. Avoid this one and just watch something nasty and funny that was actually made in the '70s like Freebie and the Bean or Busting.

Film Review: Drive (2011)

It looks good, it sounds good, and if it came in Smell-O-Rama it would be musky yet pleasant, but like so many of the Detroit products its lead character drives, Drive has problems under the hood.

First the good. The director, Nicholas Winding Refn, has an eye for color and composition that makes most of his L.A locations come alive. He even manages to make a drive along one of  L.A.'s over-photographed drainage canals seem original. The score is another plus. Refn avoids obvious musical themes and cues and goes for bombastically romantic pop songs that are a nice counterpoint to the violence and the very subdued  romance between the male and female leads, played by Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan.

The acting is very good. Gosling can't have more than three pages of dialogue in the whole film, but he manages to speak volumes with his eyes; he even manages to put meaning into the angle of the toothpick his character (known only as the Driver) always has in the corner of his mouth. Carey Mulligan, as Irene, is good, but the script doesn't ask her to do much more than produce winsome smiles. It's Albert Brooks' performance that really holds this film together. As a deceptively ordinary-looking middle-aged mobster he's scary, amusing, and very believable. He also gets all the best lines.

Where this film has problems is in the mechanics of the plot. The story is pretty basic film noir: a problematic romance becomes entangled with a criminal enterprise and nobody goes home happy. The romance portion of the plot just didn't work for me. The main problem is that the Driver almost never opens his mouth around Irene and yet she falls for him. Yes, the Driver is nice to her son, but that's one of the oldest romantic cliches in the book; almost as old as the romantic montage sequence that ends with the Driver, Irene and her son skipping stones in a creek. Skipping stones! Even Nicholas Sparks would laugh at that. And doesn't it bother Irene that the Driver is only a few syllables away from being a mute?

The final act of the film falls apart at the seams. Up until then the Driver's been acting with ruthless logic, but then his common sense seems to go out the window; he dons a needless disguise before offing one opponent, and yet continues to wear a highly individual white silk jacket that's covered in blood. He even walks into a crowded restaurant wearing the jacket and no one seems to notice it. And in a final meeting with the Albert Brooks character the Driver takes no precautions whatsoever and disaster ensues.

At times you get the feeling that Refn is presenting the Driver as more of a guardian/avenging angel than an actual person, similar to Clint Eastwood's character in Sergio Leone's films. This is an OK concept, but then The Man With No Name never attempted a romantic relationship. That kind of thing doesn't work with symbolic characters. In the end, the plot problems turn Drive into nothing more than an exercise in style. All-style films are fine with me, but just don't annoy me with a shambolic and distracting plot.