The Best Ryan Gosling Movie Is Now On Netflix
The best he ever made!
This article is more than 2 years old
From the musical fantasy La La Land to the dystopian sci-fi sequel Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling has been a part of some of the most acclaimed films of the past two decades. His most recent entry is the action thriller The Gray Man, a Netflix original, but he’s got another earlier movie charting on the streamer this week. If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can now watch the 2016 action comedy The Nice Guys on Netflix, and you won’t be alone. The film is currently #8 on the list of Netflix’s top 10 most streamed movies in the U.S., only two places behind The Gray Man. Clearly fans are into more than just the newest thing.
Ryan Gosling plays private eye Holland March, who starts off in The Nice Guys as a target of Russell Crowe‘s Jackson Healy. While all of Los Angeles knows porn star Misty Mountains is dead, the actress’ aunt swears she’s alive and hires March to find her. Meanwhile the bruiser Healy is paid to convince March to quit sticking his nose into the matter. When the same woman who hired Healy to strongarm March goes missing, the pair reluctantly pool their resources to find first Healy’s employer, and then Misty Mountains.
Set in the late seventies, with great pains taken to transport the cast back in time, The Nice Guys carries with it a bombastic, dark humor that’s perfect for the era presented. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are a surprisingly fun pair. Particularly with Crowe in a period piece, it’s tough watching it to not think “What if L.A. Confidential was a comedy?” Funny, violent (sometimes brutally so), and blessed with top-notch talent, The Nice Guys is just about the best thing Gosling has ever put out and the critics seem to agree. As aggregated over at Rotten Tomatoes, The Nice Guys gets a 91% score from critics which doesn’t at exactly put it at the top spot as far as Ryan Gosling’s films. His highest rated effort thus far is 2011’s Drive, and The Nice Guys‘ score has it tying for second with 2006’s Half Nelson and 2016’s La La Land.
Audience-wise, The Nice Guys doesn’t do quite as well, getting a decent but not stellar score of 79%, but that’s not surprising considering most audiences didn’t see the flick. In spite of critics raving about it — it’s relevant to note that the movies it ties with, La La Land and Half Nelson also mark Gosling’s only Oscar nominations to date — The Nice Guys was a commercial flop, only making a worldwide gross of $62.8 million against a production budget of $50 million. If you’re waiting for The Nice Guys 2 (or possibly The Nicer Guys or The Not-So-Nice Guys), don’t wait underwater.
The Nice Guys was directed by Shane Black, who seems to have a pretty wide gap between his hits and misses, critically speaking. While the Ryan Gosling/Russell Crowe flick impressed critics to no end, as did 2006’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, the other side of the spectrum is very much the other side of the spectrum. His 2018 The Predator was bad enough to make most critics feel it was justified that he was one of the first to die in the original movie (he plays Hawkins, the bespectacled commando who keeps trying to get the stoic Billy to laugh), and while we wouldn’t go so far to say Iron Man 3 was critically panned, it’s safe to say it wasn’t one of the films Marvel pushed for Oscar nominations.
With The Gray Man finally streaming, the next Ryan Gosling project we can expect to bow is likely to either be one of his best or one of the worst for everyone involved. Gosling will be starring as the iconic boyfriend Ken in next year’s Barbie, opposite Margot Robbie who will play the titular doll. It’s the kind of project that looks like it’s destined to be outrageous genius or more interesting than good, but we’ll have to wait and see where it falls. In the meantime, if you’re sick of all The Gray Man ads but still wouldn’t mind a great Ryan Gosling flick, check out The Nice Guys on Netflix.
