Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in new The Nice Guys trailer.

Ryan Gosling Faces Scruffy Russell Crowe, Scruffier L.A. in New Trailer for The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling Faces Scruffy Russell Crowe, Scruffier L.A. in New Trailer for The Nice Guys

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Slate's Culture Blog
March 22 2016 11:05 PM

Ryan Gosling Spars With Scruffy Russell Crowe, Even Scruffier Los Angeles in the New Trailer for The Nice Guys

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Warner Bros.

The second trailer for The Nice Guys just dropped and, just like the first one, promises a return to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang form for director Shane Black, who wrote the new film with Anthony Bagarozzi. Ryan Gosling is hapless, Russell Crowe is violent, Kim Basinger is worried, Margaret Qualley is threatened, and Matt Bomer is doing the threatening. With Inherent Vice, we’re just one shaggy ’70s Los Angeles noir away from a trend piece.

It’s great to see Crowe embracing a more ramshackle look, but it’s equally fun to see a ramshackle Los Angeles. The new trailer has the dilapidated Hollywood Sign of Argo fame, but also a pre-hair metal Sunset Strip, Hollywood Boulevard at its seediest, and a gigantic killer bee. (The bee is probably a hallucination, but the “Brazil’s ‘Killer Bee’ Rampage Continues” headline on the paper Gosling’s reading is real—it ran in the Los Angeles Times on November 27, 1977—setting Black up perfectly for one of his trademark Christmas finales.) The FX team must have had a blast de-gentrifying the city, as in the shot below of local landmark Felix Chevrolet, where high-end student apartments become low-end industrial buildings. Drag the slider below to move real estate development money in and out of University Park!

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Felix Chevrolet, Warner Bros./Google.