Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are perfect as the unlikely duo in Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys”

Simon Lund Larsen
7 min readAug 23, 2016

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.

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Simon Lund Larsen

Has a day job at a toy factory. Trying hard to figure out why some movies work really well. Byline at @OuttakeThe, @MovieTimeGuru and @CineNationShow