The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling is an affable presence. He’s hard to dislike, but in recent years he seems to have dialed down any urgency or passion in his acting (except for his big “I’m Just Ken” number in Barbie and on the Oscars). He just wants to keep himself amused, and that’s what he does in The Fall Guy. We don’t necessarily want anything more from him in this role; there’s no need for him to revisit the early drama of The Believer or Half Nelson. This is meant to be a big-budget based-on-TV wedge of cheese that gets the job done and keeps us feeling secure that it’s going to stay steadfastly vanilla and mainstream. It’s the sort of glitzy, unchallenging blockbuster that used to open on Memorial Day in the late ‘80s or early ’90s, and might have made more money then.

Gosling drives this contraption smoothly, but the movie pays a price for his noncommittal vibe. For one thing, it rubs off on Emily Blunt, who plays a cinematographer turned director, Jody Moreno, who’s supposed to be and feel a bit in over her head. As her debut, she’s helming a megabudget sci-fi thing involving cowboys and aliens, she’s working with a highly unreliable star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and she’s still sore over her breakup with Colt Seavers (Gosling), a master stuntman who usually doubles for that star. Emotionally, though, she reads as null, her complaints pulled from a screenwriting checklist. The script pushes Jody and Colt back together, and their rapport is all glib banter and “funny” scenes like the one where she requires him to be set aflame and flung into a rock over and over. Nothing of importance seems to have been lost, or be rekindled, between them.

Colt has been offline for about a year following a stunt mishap wherein he broke his back (one reason it isn’t all that funny when he keeps getting launched into that rock and his back takes the brunt of the hit). A lot of that time in the wilderness, we gather, is down to Colt’s feelings of shame about the injury and inability to face Jody, who was there when it happened. But we don’t feel this any more than we feel Jody’s anger at Colt for his ghosting her for a year. There’s a similar dynamic in Grosse Pointe Blank between John Cusack and Minnie Driver, but hangdog Cusack hooked us into his grief over the relationship and for the younger version of himself capable of simple love, and Driver sure as hell made us feel her rage and her revived feelings for him and her rage about that. Maybe director David Leitch and credited writer Drew Pearce should’ve given that film a look.

The stunts, when they come, are crunchy and elaborate. Leitch is a former stuntman and stunt coordinator himself, and knows the life. But The Fall Guy is no Hooper, much less The Stunt Man. There’s a bit of standard Hollywood japery about tough-talking but sissy movie stars, and Hannah Waddington steals the movie without much effort as a Diet Coke-addicted producer who covers her anxiety with rictus grins meant to be reassuring. That this producer essentially turns into an empty noisemaker in scenes that could be lifted out of her own cheese epics is the sort of depressing meta comedy the film passes off as satire. But there’s a purity to the stunts, realized practically whenever possible, that lifts the movie somewhat. The fight choreography seems more on-point than the many chases, which never quite impress us because they feel like, well, stunts. 

Colt has a cracking, wild-ass moment when he swings from skid to skid on a helicopter in chaotic flight, like a kid swinging from bar to bar on a jungle gym. But otherwise the stunts announce themselves too lazily, sometimes with characters batting the same banter back and forth in mid-air that they do on the ground. If the people onscreen don’t take their situations or love lives or anything else very seriously, why should we? The Fall Guy was never going to be high drama, nor should it be, but even a fizzy action-comedy should have some stakes. What does it mean, really, that the movie Jody has been thirsting to make for years, and the one for which Colt and many other stunt performers risk their lives, looks like a big stupid Comic-Con Hall H hype bomb? Are her dreams being ridiculed, or is the movie saying that so much of her time spent on Hollywood sets has cheapened her dreams? A goofball amusement like The Fall Guy shouldn’t leave us asking ourselves disheartening questions like this.

Explore posts in the same categories: action/adventure, based on tv show, comedy