In a shocking turn of events—given that it’s being written and directed by Lethal Weapon scribe Shane Black, the man who turned the common household toilet into a figure of looming, bomb-concealing terror—it would appear that the title characters in the upcoming comedy noir The Nice Guys may not be all that nice at all. Indeed, Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling seem practically uncouth in this red band trailer, what with all the fisticuffs and uncivilized gunplay they‘re engaging in as they pursue a missing girl in ’70s L.A.
Crowe plays Jackson Healy, a “messenger” whose messages seem to mostly take the form of punches to the face, although he also throws in a broken bone or two in an effort to widen his violence-based vocabulary. Gosling, meanwhile, jitters all over the place as private investigator Holland March, a whiny, nervous wreck who comes off like the anthithesis of the Drive star’s usual icy badass demeanor. Accompanied, bizarrely, by March’s tween daughter, the pair appear to bumble and shoot their way across half of Los Angeles, throwing guns around and falling off buildings like a couple of mustache-bearing Keystone Cops. Given that there are about as many tones flying around in this thing—Mob noir, bloody action, buddy comedy, kid adventure—as there are bullets, it’ll be interesting to see what Black’s end product looks like when it arrives next summer.