EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

If the world was a better place — and it’s not, trust me — we’d have had more than one adventure of Jackson Healy and Holland March. Director and co-writer Shane Black said, “I think it’s a little premature to consider a sequel. I don’t believe in jinxes necessarily, but we really need people to see this one before we can even talk about that. We’re up against some stiff superhero competition and we just need people to, you know, maybe see Captain America six times, but not the seventh and see us instead.” Later, he’d say that the movie didn’t make enough but he’d love to make another one.

March (Ryan Gosling) is a private eye who is hired by adult film starlet Misty Mountains’ (Murielle Telio) aunt Mrs. Glenn (Lois Smith). Misty’s dead, but she’s seen her alive, which leads his case to Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley), someone associated with Misty who has hired Healey (Russell Crowe) to scare off the detective. After they’re attacked, they learn that Amelia, her now-dead boyfriend Dean and Misty were working on a movie that combined pornography and investigative journalism. They’re soon hired by Amelia’s mother, a Justice Department official named Judith (Kim Basinger) and that’s when the twists and turns you expect of the noir kick in.

An attempt to bring back the era of Vanishing Point, co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi said that the name The Nice Guys aimed to be ironic and non-descriptive, as the two main characters were “literally the two worst people that we could think of and then trying to make that fun.” That said, “one breaks arms for a living and the other cons old ladies out of money.”

This movie is so 70s that they hired former Playboy centerfold photographer Arny Freytag to shoot the Misty Mountains photos. He shoots with a huge camera — an 8″ x 10″ view — which needs up to fifty flash heads. Instead of a digital shot with smaller flashes, this means that each light must be specially placed and targeted to illuminate a small area of the photo. He says that he uses each light as one of his brush strokes, illuminating each area as he incrementally builds the final image.

Speaking of sequels, you could see this as one for Russell Crowe. He’s always said that he wanted to play Bud White from L.A. Confidential again. In both movies, he’s a dumb brute who protects women and has to deal with the intelligence of Kim Basinger. They’re both set in L.A. and this is twenty years later, so it could be a spiritual sequel. He’s also said he’d love to make a sequel to The Nice Guys. I mean, they did get those business cards.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Nice Guys here.