* * 1/2 Stars | Buddy Comedy. R. 115 minutes.
Take two charismatic actors. Give them characters that are, on the surface, totally incompatible. Plunk them into your basic whodunit, a mismatched team fighting fill-in-the-blank bad guys. Stir in some shoot-’em-up action, and poof: You have a buddy-cop movie.
Technically, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe don’t play cops in “The Nice Guys.” One’s a bumbling private investigator, the other a low-life hired enforcer. But the important thing isn’t the plot. It’s the chemistry.
Gosling and Crowe also have an obvious sense of humor, which gets them far. They’d have gotten farther, though, if the movie, while at times hilarious, didn’t have such an uneven feel.
There are some inspired moments, such as when enforcer Crowe’s Jackson Healy tracks down Gosling’s Holland March in a men’s room stall.
You’ll laugh out loud.
The plot isn’t easy to explain, but here goes: We’re in 1970s Los Angeles. In a prelude, a young boy reaches under his parents’ bed to inspect their Playboy, featuring naked porn star Misty Mountain. Moments later, he witnesses a horrific car crash in which a dying Mountain herself appears lying just as sexily — and naked — on her wrecked car. (Funny but not?)
It all ends up in an incredibly energetic, chaotic shoot-’em-up. It’s fun in a manic sort of way.
