Shane Black's The Nice Guys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uteGvHOs16A

I'm in.

I still enjoy The Last Boy Scout far more than I reasonably should so, sure, I'll see this.

whats the connection? I <3 last boy scout, so good

ah n/m didn't know shane black wrote last boy scout!!

saw it last night; was fun... a live-action episode of Archer, kind of?

i liked this mostly. some of the jokes didn't really land at first but would get these delayed laughs as people in the audience started to get it. i liked that. the detroit conspiracy stuff felt obligatory.

This was a fun way to spend a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately it did feature three movie tropes that bug me:

1. Adult protagonists enlightened by the moral clarity of a precocious child.
2. Bad guy can't hit good guys even once despite spraying their general direction with a machine gun several times.
3. Smashing through broken glass is easy and results in no injuries (oddly, this movie pointedly refuses to fall into this one early on, then engages in it over and over again later).

Loved it, lotsa fun. Gosling is surprisingly funny!

Man I really really enjoyed this. Super loose plot-wise but I laughed harder than I've laughed at a movie in a while.

one 'joke' this did multiple times was having a gunfight where a random bystander gets shot. not that funny imo. altho the time the bystander was dressed up as a tree was wtf.

This was dire

Although I did laugh at the joke about bourbon martinis

agreed. I paid more attention to my watch face than the screen

dug it. could have done without so much of the wonderkid.

i thought this was great!

i laughed pretty hard at the rotating car gag.

loved this

what kind of monster wouldnt enjoy this

im a monster.

i may have enjoyed this less by seeing it with a friend who laughs as if to show he gets every joke on cue (or maybe im just humourless), but while i like seeing a movie thats as classically hollywood as this one (it could have been from the 90s? was it actually written in the 90s?), densely steeped in ambiguous noir, etc etc, i just found it a bit of a trifle (a riff on a classic genre, but without anything of depth/note that makes it more than some sort of post-genre riff). its like a funnier, less hip inherent vice, but gosling i thought just seemed to be trying to look pretty all the time. i dont think he can stop trying to look like a star/cute/loveable long enough to actually be properly funny, or a bit stupid, which is what his role really needed. hes got the james franco problem. a little too self aware and knowing to be the foil russell crowe needed. the kid wasnt terrible but i dont really know why she was there, except to maybe attract more kids to watch this?, which would make sense, as i felt i regressed a couple of years while watching it. its like kick ass meets kiss kiss bang bang. worst of all, while watching it, i kept thinking seven deadly psychopaths (which i didnt exactly love) maybe did the old shane black kind of thing better for this era. maybe i need to watch it again, idk.

actually, i think this was just dumber than i was expecting.

Ur a monster

SO BE IT

its designed for people of a certain age

or people who think the 90s is 'so cool'

or something (or people who just think gosling acting badly, though not as bad as in only god forgives, makes for a good movie)

i suppose i should give shane black some credit for barely changing, and for being an 'auteur' (aka person who repeats himself), but OTOH, its not the 90s anymore! like, i know were meant to be against the modern plotless blockbuster approach, but this sort of retrograde fluff is surely not the answer.

The 90s are back

Thank christ

This was good at what it did, and a shane black movie is never going to try to do anything else, so realistic plot and realistic characters shouldnt by now be considered as included in the ticket price

Delivered some really great funny moments, tonally all over the place, kid was annoying as fuck, im saying 8/10 ranked on its own terms.

there were a few perfectly-timed moments of gross-out humor, like when gosling and the bad guy fall over the balcony and gosling lands in the pool with a splash as the other guy lands on the patio with a splat.

the action scene surrounding that moment felt like a blurry mess to me, though.

wtf was so 90s about this

I really liked this btw

Gosling's character thinking he's invincible rather than lucky and an alcoholic so he always goes limp when falling

I really liked this. It started off strong but lost me a bit 3/4 thru. Detroit conspiracy was hamhanded, especially the woman's speech the end-- didn't need a forced ending to a shaggy dog story. I thought Gosling was hilarious, and I think he nailed exactly what you're talking about, StillAdvance. He was funny and dumb. I thought the random bystanders getting shot bit was hilarious. But I like my movies mean.

I was expecting a random casualty in the Diner scene, was pleased to just get Fat Russell Crowe (always the best Russell Crowe) beating someone into a pulp.

Kim Basinger's Accurate Victory was a great setup for the "in 5 years we'll be driving electric cars from Japan" line.

This film and my rotting aging brain confused me twice, once good once bad.

On the one hand I somehow thought that Amelia and Misty Mountains were the same, and she'd somehow faked her own death?

On the other hand I had genuinely forgotten that the ankle-piece was imaginary.

(the first misapprehension faded over the course of the film)

I think the ankle piece being imaginary was kind of foggy enough to be a good "is it or isn't it" moment

I otoh was waiting for it not to be but either way was good

hate when characters do something like that but it's choreographed so obviously that the audience sees it a mile away, this one seemed just subtle enough

Risible and endless (almost two hours!). The '70s setting means nothing when the behavior and script follow the pattern of Beverly Hills Cop 2: forced joeks followed by violence (a girl tossed through a window). Gosling is at his worst when he's signaling he's "funny."

The callousness of the violence was too underlined not to be point making imo

The only thing I liked about this, I think, were the Abbott and Costello riffs, and the way Black has invented his own little callback world of Christmas, and people falling off balconies, and children put in shockingly precarious situations, and fancy mansions and mermaids. Other than that, it was pretty disappointingly dull, with the jokes few and far between and the shaggy dog stuff even shaggier than usual. I started watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang again the other day, and Robert Downy Jr is just such a better anchor for this sort of material than Gosling, and Val is better than Crowe, too.

I love Gosling and wish he were naked in more movies but he was directed to act like a kid playing a duke in a Christmas play. There's this bit where he does a double take after he stumbles on a certain body that's leaden and way too long. Crowe can handle this material; Gosling can't play dumbfucks.

There's this bit where he does a double take after he stumbles on a certain body that's leaden and way too long

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6NIVn6_m1c

Yeah my fondness for the movie waned a little (tho looking up at my responses earlier I'd just forgotten some of it), but the Abbott & Costello stuff was golden.

"At least you're drinking again."

So entertaining, one of those rare comedy films that stays consistently funny all the way through. Gosling proving unexpectedly nifty at slapstick.

It should have been about 15 minutes or so shorter, but yeah, its fun.

It should've been about 105 minutes shorter.

Enjoyable romp. I didn't find the kid that annoying.

If it was funnier it could have been 15 minutes longer, for all I cared.

Who found the kid annoying? I thought she was good! One I read that likened her to Penny from Inspector Gadget, which is kind of right on.

*One REVIEW

This was a good time. I might rewatch KKBB again to compare but I liked it, I didn't feel any inclination to put it in a bracket up against its lol-terrible California PI brethren. It's no Long Goodbye but what is?

I loved the car in the opening scene, I liked the elevator ride to the penthouse and back, and I liked the daughter quite a bit.

i just watched this, too -- pretty fun

It was really just a lesser KKBB but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

decent way to spend two hours on a plane. i could pick it apart (especially gosling, crowe otoh was excellent) but i'd prefer to focus on the fact that it had some of the best action movie sight gags i've seen in years. the rotating car thing and the tree getting shot were worthy heirs to the best of that stuff in the naked gun films.

The worst thing I can say for it, a year later, is that it and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang have pretty much completely blurred together in my mind.

this really seems of a piece with kiss kiss bang bang to me, except not as good.

i would rewatch it if it were available on a flight i was on

i thought gosling was good. i like gosling tho

Gosling is vg in this

It suffers from Black's lack of narrative discipline but the high points are always gonna be worth it

i didnt like this at all when i watched it 5 years ago

rewatched today & thought it was great. the jokes were great, i laughed my ass off. i liked the rockford nods with the $200 a day & the newspaper ad… plus this time around i def found it kinda rockfordy in general, confidently stumbling into a huge case & accidentally kinda solving it but still losing

i guess i just needed to have enjoyed the Rockford Files to get more out if it 🤷🏻‍♀️

oh and the gun in the coffee jar! also v Rockford