Attention everyone. The first, glorious red-band trailer for director Shane Black’s ‘70s goofball buddy-cop movie The Nice Guys has just been released and it looks like an absolute blast. The noir movie stars Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as an unlikely duo thrust headfirst into a twisted tale of violence, betrayal and in true Shane Black fashion: Grammar.
The film is set in 1970s Los Angeles, where the nights were infused with neon and the days were bright under a haze of different kinds of smoke. Russell Crowe is the pro leg-breaker (quite a literal description by the looks of it) and Ryan Gosling is the low-life thug scraping a living. A missing girl and a dead porn star bring them together and keeping in line with noir tone, it all leads to conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.
The brightest take-away from this, and we couldn’t be happier about it, is that all those rumours about this being a spiritual sequel to Black’s debut feature Kiss Kiss Bang Bang are true. In fact, The Nice Guys resembles that criminally underseen classic so closely that it essentially replaces Robert Downey Jr’s character from that movie with Ryan Gosling and ropes in LA noir pro Russell Crowe (reuniting with Kim Basinger) in place of Val Kilmer’s ‘Gay’ Perry van Shrike.
Los Angeles takes centre-stage, its seedy characters providing an endless supply of goofy humour. Black is one of the best writers in the business (please watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and here, he seems to be in top form. Crowe and Gosling are, surprisingly, a perfect pair, working just as well in the action scenes as the brilliant physical gags that are generously spread across the three-minute trailer, bantering their way across town from one crazy situation to another.
This is what we wanted Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice to be before it affirmed our worst fears and turned out to be an essentially unwatchable adaptation of an unreadable novel.
With this fantastic trailer, The Nice Guys has become one of our most anticipated movies of 2016. Long live Shane Black (once again, please watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang).
The Nice Guys also stars Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley, and Ty Simpkins and opens in theaters on May 20, 2016.

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