Amidst a cocktail of cigarette smoke, booze, Yoo-hoo, blood, morality and slapstick, we find The Nice Guys—Shane Black’s latest Los Angeles crime yarn, set in the late 70s, about a duo of investigative idiots following the trail of a missing girl to discover both conspiracy and corruption.

It’s expected that a sports movie about boxing is going to have some violent sequences that actual boxing doesn’t have. For someone such as myself, you just hope that these films don’t become too over the top with it all. With Southpaw, this is one feature that I worried about, but I also went into it thinking that we could …