“The Nice Guys,” written and directed by Shane Black, has been touted as the “superhero antidote we all need.” A Los Angeles detective movie set in the 1970s, it stars Ryan Gosling as a perpetually drunk private detective who slums it on low-rent cases and Russell Crowe as a freelance tough-guy who beats people up for a price. The odd-couple find themselves in the middle of a La-La Land noir involving a missing girl, a dead porn star, and the shadowy forces who are killing everybody involved.But is this really what we need? The film marks the bright-lights return of Black, who, with the screenplay for “Lethal Weapon,” sold on spec in 1986 for a then-remarkable $250,000, introduced a template for the kind of action movie that would rule the blockbuster market through the mid 1990s: excessive male dominated shot-’em-ups injected with adrenaline and frat-house humor. “Lethal Weapon” was a major hit, grossing more than $65 million domestically. Black was only 24 years old, and he acted like it: he spent his off hours in a clubhouse called the Pad O’ Guys in West Hollywood, and was anointed into an informal group of screenwriters who were cashing in on Hollywood’s frantic purchasing spree. (New York Magazine profiled Black and other high-priced screenwriters in 1990, in a piece titled “Million Dollar Babies.”)Black kept churning out scripts, and Hollywood kept giving him more money. “The Last Boy Scout” sold for a reported $1.75 million, rumored to be the highest amount for an original script up to that point — topped by Joe Eszterhas two months later when he sold the script for “Basic Instinct,” for $3 million. Black would flame out with his biggest spec-script sale, “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” which sold for $4 million in 1994. The movie tanked at the box-office, produced a scathing attack on his work in the pages of Variety, and sent the screenwriter into hiding for almost a decade.He returned in 2005 with “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” starring Robert Downey Jr. In the interim, the kind of movie Black helped popularize had gone from hot property to problem — in the aforementioned Variety screed, editorial director Peter Bart, reportedly echoing many in the movie industry, chastised Black personally for the excessive violence in his films — and back around the circle again. What replaced the dumb-fun action movie during his absence was an even dumber and higher-priced blockbuster, and nostalgia kicked in. “Kiss Kiss” was well received, but it wasn’t a success financially. (It attracted a bigger cult following on home video.) Black remained in the shadows for the next few years, until his friend Downey brought him into the superhero fold in 2013, asking him to write and direct the third iteration of the “Iron Man” franchise. A guaranteed success, it allowed Black the freedom to make the kind of movies he wanted to make all along.This might sound like a comeback story, and in some clear ways it is. Black’s work, even the most maligned, has attracted cult audiences in a way other box-office failures of the period have not. The once hotshot screenwriter stuck to his guns, and now his movies are back in favor. But to call “The Nice Guys” an antidote is missing the obvious: Black might have been off the grid, but his work never disappeared. Instead, it was absorbed into the mainstream. Before Downey helped him get hired on “Iron Man,” the modern superhero movie already bore traces of the Shane Black-style, just glitzier and with a more contemporary moral compass. Superheroes aren’t as reckless as the protagonists in a typical Shane Black film, but they wield the same kind of humor and reach for the same kind of relatability.Which makes “The Nice Guys” feel less like a refreshing counter to what’s popular and more like a scaled-down version of the same thing. Sure, it’s funny to a point, especially Gosling, who is hamming it up, and there are fantastic set pieces and wildly choreographed shoot-outs that are loud and intense. I’m not immune to the pleasures this film offers. But what made Black interesting, and what made him popular, was how he took something that already existed — the action film, the buddy comedy, whatever you want to call it — and perfected it. He made something the best that it could be. “The Nice Guys” feels like a step backwards, an artist running on empty. This is a good version of a Shane Black film. But what we really need is the Shane Black film that we can’t predict, the one that bursts on the scene like an exploding car. “The Nice Guys” opens in theaters on May 20.
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