So much of the discourse about this movie was in the meta-sense of "big, vaguely selfaware action rom-com starring two of the leads from Barbenheimer that is critically well-received but a box-office bomb — whither Hollywood?!" I think you can safely ignore that kind of pablum; this movie is neither good nor essential enough to warrant a wave of discourse, which is not to say that it's bad. It's not a Very Good movie; it's a very Good movie — in the lineage of The Nice Guys or The Other Guys (both Guys movies themselves), winking and pleasant and charming and a little bit overlong.

There absolutely should be more of these kinds of films, if for no other reason than to remind us that part of the value proposition of top-tier movie stars is that they can elevate something a little bit further past its script-borne shackles. (And Gosling is terrific in this, make no bones about it.) But it is not some sort of deep, industrial crime that this is not more widely beloved.

★★★★