The Nice Guys (2016)

What makes The Nice Guys special is how it turns a grubby 1970s L.A. conspiracy into a fizzy, sharply written buddy caper where every punchline lands and every clue feels like it’s been soaked in neon and smog. Shane Black stages the mayhem with a storyteller’s rhythm—action that’s genuinely exciting, comedy that’s character-driven, and a mystery that keeps tightening its grip without asking you to do homework. Russell Crowe brings bruised gravitas to the muscle while Ryan Gosling weaponizes panic and pratfalls with immaculate timing, and together they create the kind of chemistry that makes even a simple conversation feel like entertainment. It’s not for the squeamish—there’s plenty of violence, profanity, and sleaze baked into the setting—but if you can roll with that, you’ll get a wildly fun ride that’s smarter and more charming than it has any right to be.

The Nice Guys is trying to be a shaggy-dog 1970s neo-noir where a grim conspiracy plot is really just the runway for mismatched-buddy chaos, and on that level it mostly knows what vibe it wants. The best reason to watch is the chemistry: Gosling’s flustered, physical-comedy energy plays beautifully off Crowe’s blunt-force seriousness, and the period atmosphere is genuinely fun. But if you need a tight mystery or razor-sharp writing, the screenplay can feel more like a string of loud set pieces and detours than a story that consistently lands its punches. Also, the movie is very comfortable wallowing in sleaze—nudity, porn-adjacent material, heavy profanity, drugs, and sudden violence—so if that’s not your idea of a good time, this won’t convert you.