"The Nice Guys" Review

Before he returns to the Predator franchise in 2018, Shane Black delivers another solid (albeit imperfect) comedy caper in The Nice Guys, starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling.

The stars play a pair of mismatched private detectives tasked with unraveling a mystery surrounding the death of a porn star in late-'70s Los Angeles. Crowe plays Jackson Healy, a seasoned tough-guy who prefers to get things done with fists and handguns. Gosling is Holland March, the more bumbling of the two who seems to always haphazardly get results at the expense of his personal relationships. His 13-year old daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) disapproves of her dad's drinking and disorganization. Throughout the film, she turns up to reign both her dad and Jackson in as they work towards solving the case.

Black has always written interesting child characters and directed great performances from the actors playing them. That's the case here as Rice delivers a strong performance of a solid character. It's just that Holly feels so superfluous at times. Something's wrong with the script if you've got two of the biggest movie stars in the world constantly leaning on an unknown kid to move the plot forward and keep the audience engaged.

That said, Crowe and Gosling still have ample room to flesh their characters out in this world. They display excellent chemistry even if Gosling remains the more comically inclined of the two.

Things don't really go awry for the film itself until the last 20 or 30 minutes in which a conspiracy between Los Angeles city officials and Detroit auto makers reveals itself. Black creates a very vivid world here that's distinctly '70s West Coast, and then the story betrays it by shoehorning in some weak L.A.-based villains who suddenly seem obsessed with the city of Detroit. This culminates in an underwhelming climax that left me with far more questions than answers.

On the whole, Crowe and Gosling serve up a satisfying number of belly laughs while Black delivers plenty of solid action sequences. The Nice Guys just needs a script with a less hackneyed payoff.

B

"Hail, Caesar!" Review

At one point in the Coen Brothers' new film, studio production chief Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) gathers a boardroom full of clergymen and heralds the fictional Hail, Caesar! as "a prestige picture featuring one of the biggest stars in the world." The Coen's Hail, Caesar!, despite also featuring one of the biggest stars in the world - George Clooney, falls far short of being a "prestige picture" in its own right. The film really amounts to nothing more than incomplete character arcs and a series of only marginally funny excuses to feature stars like Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill, and Frances McDormand.

The story follows Mannix as he juggles production duties on several films shooting on his Capitol Pictures backlot. When the star of his biggest blockbuster is kidnapped, Mannix tries to contain the situation by quietly enlisting the help of some of the studio's other contracted actors to find out what happened.

The marketing made this out to be a classic Coen caper more in line with The Big Lebowski than middle-of-the-road fare like Burn After Reading. Though Hail, Caesar! features many classic hallmarks of the Coens' work, including strong neo-noir elements and undertones of political paranoia, the simple narrative becomes lost in the tangled web it tries to weave. As a result, the whole endeavor ends up feeling loosely plotted and unfocused. An unnecessary subplot with Mannix fielding a job offer from Boeing is meant to add another dimension to the story (the threat of obsolescence) but instead leads the film to meander in more places than it needs to.

All the same, Hail, Caesar! taught me a valuable lesson that I should've learned by now - when it comes to the Coen Brothers, throw all expectations and pretensions out the window. I would like to see the film at least one more time to pick up any nuances I may have missed.

 For all its narrative flaws, Hail, Caesar! features lush production design that almost perfectly captures the spirit of "Old Hollywood." Film buffs will also love the allusions to the works and personas of industry legends such as William Wyler, Cecil B. DeMille, Gene Kelly, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Esther Williams.

C+