“Mr. Healy, if you kill this man, I will never speak to you again,” a preteen girl snaps at a middle-aged man who is choking the life out of a dapper assassin toward the end of Shane Black’s period action comedy “The Nice Guys.” It’s a fitting moment of dramatic tension for a film I can only describe as the most wholesome story about a dead porn star, a conspiracy to let the car industry evade emissions standards and the radical environmental activists who want to bring that conspiracy down through an “alternative” adult movie you will ever see in theaters.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Mr. Healy (Russell Crowe) is Jackson Healy, a low-level enforcer, who meets private eye Holland March (Ryan Gosling) when a mysterious woman named Amelia (Margaret Qualley) hires Jackson to try to get several men, of whom March is one, to stop following her. March has been following Amelia because he thinks she might be able to explain why an old woman (Lois Smith) is convinced that her niece, the perfectly named porn star Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio), is still alive, even though Misty dies in a dramatic car wreck in the movie’s opening sequence. March also happens to have a daughter, the aforementioned tween, Holly (Angourie Rice), who as the movie proceeds will prove to be the most competent investigator in this supremely odd trio.
If this all sounds utterly bonkers, that’s sort of the point; “The Nice Guys” works better as a movie that elicits unexpected emotions and leads you to sly conclusions.
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On the former question, the biggest surprise of “The Nice Guys” is how sweet it is. Early in the film, when Misty’s car crashes into the house where a boy has just stolen her centerfold from under his parents’ bed, he strips off his pajama shirt and rather tenderly covers her up, restoring her dignity. March may be a depressed drunk, the kind of guy who would take his daughter to a party at a porn king’s louche Bel Air mansion, but he also obviously adores Holly and enjoys spending time with her. It’s a sentiment Healy comes to share.
Follow this authorAlyssa Rosenberg's opinionsObviously, it’s not exactly new for a movie or television show to mash up a heartwarming story about a family getting closer in totally bizarre circumstances. “The Americans” does this every week. But “The Nice Guys” executes this formula with a nice, light touch and succeeds because Holly doesn’t need protecting. In between “The Nice Guys” and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), the laconic minor superheroine in “Deadpool,” 2016 is shaping up to be a nice year of tributes to girls from quarters where you might not anticipate it.
That same irreverent-but-effective treatment applies to the storytelling as well as the character development. It would be hard for me to argue that “The Nice Guys” is deeply engaged with the environmental skulduggery that drives its plot, though the movie is certainly committed to the issue as a way of establishing the time period, and as a source of very funny gags.
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The characters hear smog alerts on the radio and blithely ignore fights in the lines at gas stations where signs proclaim that customers are limited to 10 gallons per visit. In the course of their hunt for Amelia, Healy and March track down the environmental advocacy group she was involved with, only to find its members engaged in a die-in on behalf of birds who are choking on the polluted air. I won’t deny you the pleasure of watching this particular setpiece for yourself, except to note how much I laughed when one of the protesters declared peevishly, “Sorry, can’t help you. We’re dead.”
And when the trio tracks down Amelia, “The Nice Guys” has a great deal of fun with her use of left-wing jargon and her conviction that it’s possible to bring down the American car industry with a porn film*, even as her conspiratorial rantings turn out to be completely and utterly correct. The movie may be set in the ’70s, but it’s a nice, and highly relevant, reminder that you can critique a political movement on questions of style without losing sight of the substance of its arguments.
* Of all the things in “The Nice Guys” that might seem like a wild invention, the idea of using erotica to draw attention to environmental issues is the one thing that’s actually real. A Norwegian rainforest conservation group has been funding itself with pornography since 2004.
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