THE NICE GUYS (Rated R)

Writer and director Shane Black has a good handle on how to deliver an action-comedy that pairs unlikely partners and pits them against powerful or dangerous adversaries for which they would, on paper, seem outmatched.

To understand the Shane Black cinematic touch, you only need to recall his great initial success nearly three decades ago in teaming Mel Gibson’s unhinged detective Martin Riggs with Danny Glover’s stable veteran LAPD cop Roger Murtaugh in “Lethal Weapon.”

Add to the “Lethal Weapon” legacy Black’s tongue-in-cheek sensibility to create complex characters in the action genre in such films as “The Last Boy Scout” and “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” and it naturally follows that “The Nice Guys” would be yet another Joel Silver production.

In fact, producer Joel Silver has observed that Shane Black has a “unique cinematic voice” whose films are “not traditional comedies, they are action pictures with humor, which is a different aesthetic.” This pretty much sums up the genre in which “The Nice Guys” lands with full force.

On a fundamental level, “The Nice Guys” is a detective story with hardboiled, tough guys. Well, actually, considering that a Shane Black buddy action-comedy involves mismatched partners, only one of them here is truly tough in a dangerous sort of way.

The hard-hitting fellow is Russell Crowe’s Jackson Healy, a hired enforcer whose typical work involves knocking people around on behalf of an aggrieved party. Oddly enough, he operates on a moral code that doesn’t go for the overkill.

It’s Los Angeles in 1977, and the famed Hollywood sign is crumbling, which serves as a metaphor for the societal decay on display. People are lining up for gas instead of movies. The glitter of Tinseltown is clouded by a thick blanket of smog. Porn actors and thugs roam freely.

Shrouded in the burnt orange haze are the seemingly separate but intertwined mysteries surrounding a missing girl, the death of a porn star in an elaborate car accident, and a high-level corporate conspiracy that unravels during a glitzy auto show.

A hapless private eye named Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a borderline alcoholic and widower, relies on the help of his precocious 13-year old daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) just to navigate the daily grind of life.

March’s detective business appears to thrive on jobs from elderly women not really in touch with reality. One such assignment involves searching for porn star Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio), who everyone knows died recently in a fiery car crash.

Connected tangentially to the porn star’s demise is the missing girl Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who seems to have a target on her back, except we’re not exactly sure why. Her case might be related to the violent death of the porn star, or at least Healy thinks so.

Healy and March first meet under circumstances much less than fortunate for the private eye, considering that hired muscle Healy breaks March’s arm as a warning to stay away from Amelia.

But later, Healy shows up in a bowling alley men’s room, where March is otherwise occupied and in a rather vulnerable position. Even more surprising, Healy says he now wants to hire March to help him track down Amelia.

This is ironic because it was Amelia who originally hired Healy to throw March off her trail. But things change when Healy learns, the hard way, that some rather nefarious people are looking for Amelia, who’s now in hiding.

Meanwhile, March and Healy are hired by Judith Kuttner (Kim Basinger), head of the California Department of Justice, to find her estranged daughter, the very same Amelia already being sought by the two hired gumshoes.

But March and Healy are not the only non-family members seeking Amelia. There are several dangerous people on the hunt for her, none more threatening than the professional assassin who goes by the name John Boy (Matt Bomer), a violent nutjob who loves firing machine guns.

Other hired guns searching for Amelia are referred o only as Older Guy (Keith David) and Blue Face (Beau Knapp), both of them apparently working for porn king Sid Shattuck, who’s only seen once his dead body is accidentally found by March during a disco party.

It doesn’t matter much that “The Nice Guys” has a plot where things don’t completely add up. The two partners stumble upon a scheme to suppress a porn film that exposes the conspiracy of the Big Three automakers to thwart the catalytic converter.

Mixing up the story with good humor and great banter, the oddball pairing of a pudgy, blunt and disheveled Russell Crowe paired with a nervous, inept and shaky Ryan Gosling are the main draw, but the young Angourie Rice is a real treasure as Gosling’s wise-beyond-her-years offspring.

“The Nice Guys,” which deserves its R rating for violence, nudity and language among other things, is casual, in an almost slapstick way, with its humorous cruise through the cesspool of corruption and boogie nights sleaze. It’s great fun on the seamy side of the era.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.