Crowe and Gosling are a classic couple of odd birds, writes
he hits the bourbon at noon. As the guys screech between crime scenes, gunfights and bacchanals, both actors have a kind of multi-coloured neon glow of happiness, as if neither can quite believe that the franchise-fixated Hollywood of 2016 has taken a swing at this kind of deliriously unreconstructed one-off romp.
As the writer of the first two Lethal Weapon films and architect of the modern buddy cop genre, Black is an old hand at balancing brute force with quick wit — and his flair for gourmet trash is evident in every impossibly snappy exchange of repartee and fireball-belching shoot-out.
There is a standout party sequence in which the fun piles up like a carameltopped croque-en-bouche: countless manic interactions and ingenious action beats, all set against a gyrating backdrop of Boogie Nights-era titillation. It’s not big and it’s not smart — but, the way Black does it, it’s somehow virtuosic in its dumbness.
Neither lead is playing to type, exactly, so much as types gone halfway to seed. Crowe is 52 years old now, and has warmly embraced the dramatic possibilities of middle-aged spread. Jackson is all gruff bulk, practiced at handling himself whenever trouble breaks out, but determinedly unreflective about his life choices, and Crowe energises his performance with those flickering uncertainties.
Gosling, meanwhile, plays the kind of moustachioed bro who — for want of a better way of putting it — thinks he’s Ryan Gosling, giving Holland a loose-swaggering confidence that amusingly exceeds his practical abilities.
In short, they’re a classic odd couple. Black knows the noir, cop thriller and action rule books back to front, and while The Nice Guys is less winkingly post-modern than his too-little-known 2005 directorial debut, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it embraces the conventions of the films it’s fondly sending up.
Both heroes, for instance, have lost their wives — Holland in tragic circumstances, and Jackson to another man, whose identity is revealed in a clockwork-precise cutaway gag. This frees them up to spend maximum time mano a mano in the knowledge that bromance is as deep as their feelings for one another will get. Holland also has a 13-year-old daughter called Holly, played by Angourie Rice, who fills what you might call the Penny-from-Inspector-Gadget role of remaining five steps ahead of the adults at all times.
Like much else in The Nice Guys, this is purest cliché — but predictability, when handled as deftly as it is here, can be as gripping as a well-turned mystery. In a celebrated essay on Casablanca, the author Umberto Eco wrote: “Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.” The Nice Guys is no Casablanca, but it’s a hell of a party. — © The Daily Telegraph, London