#340: THE NICE GUYS

2016
Directed by Shane Black
Mystery, Comedy, Action.

It feels like it's been a while since I had my last Ryan Gosling fix, but fortunately he has come back after a little break making The Big Short, and now this new film The Nice Guys. Here he is paired up with Russell Crowe, an actor I've always found to be very hit and miss. The Nice Guys is part Comedy, part Action and part Neo-Noir detective Drama. Set in 1978, it has a very vintage look and feel that was very well accomplished. Visually it reminded me of the films Anchorman and Boogie Nights, as the characters all wear their Disco influenced attires and go to seedy parties. 

Ryan Gosling plays a private investigator who is also a widow, left alone to look after his very mature 13 year old daughter. Russell Crowe's character isn't as fleshed out, with not a lot said about his personal life, but he essentially beats people up for money (I'm starting to see why they chose Russell Crowe for this role). At first he is sent to beat up Ryan Gosling for getting too deep into a missing persons case. Crowe comically breaks Gosling's arm in one of the funnier scenes in the film, and so they have fun with Gosling having to spend the entire film with his arm in a cast. Eventually the two "nice guys" end up working together when they realise they have the same pair of gangsters out to get them. They are also on a mission to try and find missing teenager Amelia.

The Nice Guys has two strong elements going for it. The first is that the acting is top notch. Gosling and Crowe have a very radiant chemistry on screen and make an unlikely good buddy duo. Certainly this is one of Crowe's best roles in a while now, and it seems naturally tailored to his personality. But the real star of the show is newcomer Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling's teenage daughter. Normally one of my pet peeves in cinema is children in leading roles, but she didn't annoy me one bit! The character is a little odd though, considering she is said to be 13, she looks closer to 16, but throughout the film she is seen driving cars, watching pornos and taking out bad guys. The running gag of the film is that she is better at solving the mystery than her PI dad is, and so she tags along for the entire film. I'm just not sure why they didn't make her character a bit older so that her personality traits were more fitting. The other strongest element of the film is that it has a pretty compelling mystery with some thrilling scenes. The best scene of the film takes place in a Playboy-esque mansion where a huge sex party is being held, and two have to interrogate people and search for clues. It definitely has nods to Film Noir and detective films. 

There were however some glaring issues with The Nice Guys. The biggest one being that, you could tell this film was attempting to be comedic all the way through, but I felt like so many of the "jokes" completely bombed. I laughed out loud only twice during the film, and I found the rest of the cinema were pretty quiet for most of the film too. The attempts at humour were so weak that I just couldn't understand why it needed to have Comedy parts at all. Especially when the writers have done a pretty good job coming up with a good Mystery/Thriller story. The drama elements work well too, with Gosling struggling to raise his daughter alone. The Nice Guys also feels the need to cram in big Action sequences. There are plenty of fist fights, gun shootouts and even a couple of car chases thrown in there. Again these Action scenes didn't really feel that necessary or add much to the film. In fact a rather large Action sequence near the end was so over the top and ridiculous that it ended up padding out the plot unnecessarily and I was just left wanting the film to reach it's conclusion. When the film does end, it throws in a sequelbaiting part which may be a little ambitious. 

Ultimately I have to say that I enjoyed The Nice Guys enough to recommend it. The Mystery plot is what compelled me the most, and the performances are very remarkable. Maybe others will enjoy the jokes and the big Action scenes more than I did, but for me they fell very flat. I think this film could have been improved with a re-edit, taking out some of the goofier parts and focusing more on the Mystery plot, and it would have been a tighter film. The movie definitely shares its blueprints with director Shane Black's earlier film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The Nice Guys is a good one watch film, but not great enough to be worth revisiting. 6/10.

#303: BIRDEMIC: SHOCK & TERROR

2008

Directed by James Nguyen

Natural Horror, Thriller.

If you know me well or you have followed my reviews for a while, you'll know that I have a sick obsession when it comes to films that are so bad they are good, or "goofs" as I like to call them. I count cult classics such as The Room, Troll 2 and Undefeatable as some of the most entertaining films out there! Films that I can watch over and over again and appreciate more than the latest Oscar winner!

Having seen a few clips on YouTube and read about Birdemic: Shock & Terror, I knew that this film would be right up my street. Birdemic just received a UK Blu-Ray release and is actually being sold in shops, which is wonderful and frightening in equal measures! But I couldn't resist, and it is jam packed with special features too!

In case you don't know about Birdemic, it is considered to be one of the worst films ever made. It looks like a student made this film to submit for a college course, and even then I doubt they would have landed a passing grade! The film is basically a rip off of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and sees a bunch of rogue birds attack people at a seaside US town for almost no explainable reason! But the film is most famous for it's extremely low quality. It looks like it could easily have been filmed on a cheap handheld camera or even an I-Phone, and the editing is incredibly basic, and could have easily been done in under a week on Windows Movie Maker. The acting is lower than Porno levels, and somehow the lead actor happens to be the worst of the lot, expressing absolutely no emotion or concern even during the most "tense" scenes. At least the leading lady is somewhat competent, but not enough to make a career out of acting. The editing is beyond terrible, the sound mixing is all over the place, with some scenes being battered by the sound of the wind, making the dialogue near inaudible. Scenes cut to the next one without any rhyme of rhythm and the infamous "special effects" look like 2 second looped gifs of birds have been copy and pasted onto the screen! Whenever you hear the heroes of the film shooting their guns at the birds, cheap stock sound effects are used and the toy prop guns don't even look real or like they are actually firing anything. The entire soundtrack is cheap and sounds like it has been picked from a stock library. Despite being made in 2008, Hitchcock's The Birds, that was made in 1963, looks far more accomplished in every technical aspect.

The actual plot of the film is very, very lopsided. The first half is very slow and uninteresting. We see our forgettable leading man go to work and succeed in a big sales pitch, and go on a date with the leading lady, winning her charms despite his inability to express an emotion or say anything interesting or charming. I guess the script says they like each other, so the audience just has to go with it! The film is padded out with inane scenes of the leading man playing basketball with his friend, and the leading lady securing a modelling contract. The only chuckles to be had during the first half of the film are the first few times you see the terrible acting and the abrupt editing, but even this soon becomes a bore. There is a pretty comical scene where they go on a date at a bar, and a singer is badly lip syncing to a cheesy R&B song. The scene goes on for like 5 minutes and goes nowhere!

About half way through, the film makes an incredible shift in tone completely out of nowhere. All of sudden the screen is filled with poorly animated birds, whose shits are capable of blowing up buildings below. The characters humourously try to fend off the birds with coathangers. The film does start to become more entertaining, funny and silly during the last half, but it is such a slog making it upto this point. Even though Tommy Wiseau's immortal cult classic The Room is nearly as bad in quality, and is also full of go nowhere scenes, that film has a hypnotic atmosphere to it that makes it captivating for the entire length. Mainly because of Tommy Wiseau's enigmatic screen presence. Birdemic doesn't have that quality though, it is just BAD. And really boring. The laughs are very few and far between. One of the few saving graces of the film is that it comically crams in as many pro-environmental messages as it possible can, and not subtly. We see background posters and even characters wearing shirts advertising Yoko Ono's "Imagine Peace" website. The reason for the birds attacking is blamed on global warming, with a random scene where a "scientist" talks on and on about the dangers of global warming. At least the director has some sort of moral code, but if only he had found a better way to make his points!

I kind of feel bad that this film had a cinema release and even a Blu-Ray release, because it offers everything that is terrible and amateurish in film making, but fails to be remotely entertaining and interesting for most of its duration. It's not a so bad it's funny kind of film, it's just bad and painfully dull. If you watch a 3 minute clip of the film on YouTube, then that is enough, don't fool yourself into thinking the full film must be full of comedy gold like I did, because it isn't! I've seen non-film makers post up YouTube videos that had a better sense of editing and basic film making than this film has. I can honestly say I have made videos of better quality than Birdemic, and I do not consider myself a film maker! The whole film seems like a cruel joke, and the Blu-Ray release just extends that bad taste even further! Avoid this one and watch The Room or Troll 2 instead! 1/10.