Within the first few minutes of Shane Black’s comedy noir The Nice Guys, we witness two things. The first is Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign: ragged in disrepair, its letters teeter, slashed with graffiti wherever they haven’t been set on fire. The second—via a house-smashing, hill-tumbling car crash—is the spectacular death of a porn actress named Misty Mountains.
Welcome to 1977 Los Angeles—where they’ve run out of gasoline, where the government is corrupt, and where sunbaked smog smears everything into a yellow haze. It’s kind of a shithole…