Blu-ray Movie Reviews

The year is 1977 in Los Angeles, California. Disco reigns supreme, the porn industry is flourishing, killer bees are emigrating from South America, and smog has reached epidemic levels. Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a hard-hitting thug for hire, taking work wherever he can find it. Most times, it involves beating the crap out of some guy who’s bothering a young lady and breaking numerous bones in the process. Holland March (Ryan Gosling) is a burnt-out ex-cop now private detective who’s not above deceiving a client to maintain a steady paycheck. And these are the Nice Guys.

Through maligned fate, a missing woman named Amelia has thrown Healy and March together into a very tenuous and strained partnership. Apparently, Amelia and her friends have made an incendiary independent film that turns out to be a scathing indictment on the automotive industry and the resulting smog crisis. Some very powerful and dangerous people will stop at nothing to ensure that this film never gets seen. Soon, everyone remotely involved with the film is turning up dead in very bad ways, and Healy and March are up to their butterfly collars in trouble.

The Nice Guys is basically the steroid-induced love child of L.A. Confidential and Boogie Nights. Shane Black of Lethal Weapon fame has co-written and directed this wickedly funny action yarn. Gosling and Crowe are terrific together, and much of the film’s humor centers on their interpersonal banter and squabbles. I will be a Crowe fan until the day I die. In my opinion, the man can do no wrong, but even I have to concede that Gosling pulls off the impossible and steals it from him. But just barely.

The HD picture quality is superb. Lighting schemes, textures, and period detail come to vivid life in both the inter- ior and exterior sequences. The darker nighttime scenes feature solid blacks with hardly any pixilated grain or motion blur. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio performs masterfully well with car crashes, explosions, gun shots, fist punches, and all other manners of chaos pulsating through your surround speakers without overpowering the clever dialogue.

Out of all the overblown empty-noise super-sequels of 2016, The Nice Guys was one of the few films of the year that I thoroughly enjoyed from beginning to end. This movie is awesome. Don’t miss it.

Blu-Ray
Studio: Warner Bros., 2016
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Audio Format: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Length: 116 mins.
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Shane Black
Starring: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice