In Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys” (2016) we follow private eye Holland March (played by Ryan Gosling). He tries to juggle the life of private eye and father of a teenage girl in Los Angeles in 1977 and is not doing well at any of it. He is forced to take on whatever case that he can find. One of these cases includes helping out an elderly woman who “hasn’t seen her husband since his (own) funeral”. Another case is from an aunt trying to track down her niece that the police have positively confirmed as dead.

The latter case with the presumed missing niece, finds March teaming up with the hired enforcer Jackson Healy (played by Russell Crowe). They quickly learn that nothing is what it seems and soon the duo is in way over their heads.

It’s a story that we’ve seen a thousand times before. The unlikely duo of private eye and enforcer trying to clean up the mess of seedy Hollywood. We’ve seen it as an action movie, as a comedy, and as a drama. So Shane Black had a huge task ahead of him trying to find an original angle of his screenplay.

That might also be the reason why the screenplay was making the rounds in Hollywood since 2003, without ever getting any particular director or actor attached.

It ended up being Black’s long-time producer friend Joel Silver who finally agreed to make the movie with Shane Black as the director.

Black and Silver

Shane Black is known in Hollywood for a special kind of writing style. He often inserts small comments throughout the screenplay to the reader. Something that is not meant to make it into the final movie, it’s only put in the screenplay to help the reader visualize the scenes and the action.

His major breakthrough came in the late 1980s with the script for “Lethal Weapon” (1987). That movie made him the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood and put him in business with legendary producer Joel Silver. It was a screenplay that is filled with these self-referential comments to the reader.

Just take this example from the very first page of Lethal Weapon.

They don’t teach screenwriting like that in film schools. Shane Black’s script stuck out. It was different. Not just in tone, but how it was written.

Joel Silver produced Lethal Weapon in 1987 and followed up with “Die Hard” the year after. These two movies ushered in a new era in action movies. Action movies had been given a revival the decade earlier with the “Dirty Harry” movies and the like. Lethal Weapon and Die Hard continued on and expanded the genre. They kept some of the gritty violence but added humor and an overall lighter tone to softening in the impact of the violence.

The Nice Guys is not Shane Black’s first movie as director — he debuted in that role with “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” from 2005, which effectively brought Robert Downey Jr.’s career back to life. In that regard, it was only fitting that Shane Black got to direct Downey again as Iron Man in “Iron Man 3” from 2013.

But Shane Black wanted to return to stories with a smaller scope. He was thus thrilled that his 2003 screenplay for The Nice Guys was finally getting off the ground.

Reversals

What Shane Black works to perfection in The Nice Guys is the way he is playing off our expectancies as the audience. He knows that we have seen movies like this before, so he has to do something new in order to stand out from the herd of buddy comedies. He twists almost all scenes. They start in one direction and then slowly moves in completely other direction.

Say you have a character who walks into a haunted house. They realise there’s a ghost there and they decide to investigate further. But if I was writing the movie, I would have that character run out of the house the moment he realises it’s haunted — and not stop running for 10 miles. It’s not what the audience is expecting — but it’s exactly what would happen in real life. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I had a character playing Russian roulette. He put a single bullet in a gun and spun the chamber. The tension built — and then he blew his own brains out. Which isn’t what you usually expect to happen when you see a Russian roulette scene. You have to keep surprising your audience. (Shane Black interviewed in The Guardian in 2009)

Almost all the scenes in the movie are like this. Let me give you some examples from the first act of the movie.

Nice Guy In A Suit

When we first meet Ryan Gosling’s character, the private eye Holland March, we see him relaxing in a bathtub. The camera starts low on him lying in the bathtub and slowly starts to move up, and it clearly looks like a type of scene we’ve seen before.

But there he is. He’s relaxing in the bathtub alright, but not as we might expect — he’s laying in there wearing a very nice suit and tie. He’s even still wearing his gold watch. And the bathtub is filled to the top with water. And he has clearly no idea what he is doing in the bathtub or how he ended up there with all his clothes on.

That was not what the audience expected. That is not how these scenes normally play out. But had we not had the — although brief — familiar setup, the main character taking a bath wearing a suit would just be strange.

Presented like this it’s funny.

The Cool Detective

After he wakes up in the bathtub we follow him around town as he is canvassing the bars of downtown LA looking for a girl named Amelia that he believes is mistaken for the missing niece. He comes across a bartender who recognizes Amelia but refuses to give up any more information. But no good detective is ever deterred by some minor setback as an uncooperative witness, so March hides out in the back alley waiting for the bartender to close up shop for the night.

March is the cool PI of yesteryear. If Sam Spade had a son, it would have been Holland March. And Gosling plays him like that.

March sneaks up to the back-door of the bar, covers his fist and breaks the window to unlock the door. But here the scene takes a sharp turn and goes off in a completely unexpected way. When March knocks his fist through the window he accidentally slits his wrist and starts to bleed profusely. Hard cut to March being rushed to ER in the back of an ambulance while the medic is yelling “We’re losing him!”

See the entire scene in the video below: