The Nice Guys (2016) * * *

Directed by:  Shane Black

Starring:  Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice, Margaret Qualley, Kim Basinger, Matt Bomer

Los Angeles, 1977.    Smog alerts are a daily news item.    Lines for gasoline become violent.    Porn is flourishing.     Or as some would refer to it as...the good old days.     Anyone who longs for the times like these when life was "simpler" should take a look at The Nice Guys if not just for the true sense of time and place the movie offers.      It is more fun than just a trip down memory lane.     The Nice Guys is a comic action thriller in which the actors are clearly having a great time and their joy is infectious.    

As the film opens, Russell Crowe is Jackson Healy, muscle for hire whose greeting is usually a punch in the face with brass knuckles.     He makes sure you get whatever message the person who hired him wants you to get.     A young woman named Amelia (Qualley) pays him to beat up on private eye Holland March (Gosling), who is looking for her.     Healy punches the hapless private eye and then breaks his arm, warning March (in as nice a way as possible under the circumstances) to back off.     Soon, thugs attack Healy in his apartment looking for the same Amelia, and Healy decides to hire March to help him track her.   

March drinks a lot and takes cases from people like a confused elderly woman who hasn't seen her husband "since the funeral."    March looks on the mantel and sees her husband's cremation urn, but takes the money anyway.     Times are tough and you gotta pay the bills.      The search for Amelia is aided by March's loving daughter Holly (Rice), who may just be smarter than her father if not more sensible.     Healy and March come across clues and persons of interest, sometimes through ingenuity and sometimes through sheer dumb luck.   

One such instance occurs when Healy and March crash a Hollywood party complete with mermaids, porn screenings, drink, and drugs.     March drunkenly slips from a balcony and rolls down a hill, stopping right next to the dead body of a porn producer they were seeking.      It is quite obvious from March's reaction that he hasn't seen many dead bodies before.    Then the duo looks to dispose of the body and throw it over a fence.     Not the best idea either, as you'll see.

Each actor plays well off of each other.    Crowe is the born straight man.     Gosling, an actor who doesn't play dumb usually, is very good as the type of guy who would say, "Do you know who else was following orders?    Hitler," and then wink at his cohort like he just said something brilliant.     March is the Los Angeles version of Jacques Clouseau, someone who solves cases in spite of himself.     Angourie Rice is not only brighter than these two sometimes, but a voice of morality and reason.     She knows there will be violence and mayhem, but doesn't want Healy to kill anyone.     Sometimes, he finds he just can not abide.    Rice reminds me of a teenage Brie Larson. 

The Nice Guys has some fistfights, chases, and shootouts.     These are to be expected and they are no better or worse handled than in countless other films.     The plot becomes more entangled with the introduction of Kim Basinger, who plays a justice department bigwig looking for Amelia also, since she is her daughter.     Her motives are murky and her involvement in the plot becomes even murkier.   We just don't know what side she is on.     L.A. Confidential fans will be quick to recognize the reunion between Crowe and Basinger, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in that film.     You could almost say Crowe plays a version of his Bud White character, circa twenty years later.   

There is enough action to satisfy action fans, but I like the parts the best when Crowe, Gosling, and Rice were having fun and doing their thing.      I would even like to see this trio return for a sequel.