The Fall Guy
Stuntmeister David Leitch piles on the explosive sound effects in an over-produced, smartass and mind-numbingly ludicrous take on the 1980s TV series.
Falling for love: Ryan Gosling
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Barbenheimer was so last summer. Ryan Gosling got an Oscar nomination for Barbie, Emily Blunt got one for Oppenheimer, and now they’re teamed up for this overblown parody of…what? A homage to dumb action movies which is even sillier than the real thing, The Fall Guy is a redundant resurrection of the 1981-1986 TV series which starred Lee Majors (who makes the obligatory cameo here). A joke is not funny if you broadcast the punchline and a punch to the face means nothing if it’s detonated with a sound effect. So who better to make a film about stuntmen than former stunt performer and stunt coordinator David Leitch? But Leitch is invested in the stunts above all else, as evidenced in his films Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw and Bullet Train. There are countless fans of the action porn of John Wick – which Leitch produced – but it leaves little for the rest of us. A good stunt should actually bring a frisson to an action film – foreplay has its function, too.
Ryan Gosling is at his most smug and abstruse as stuntman Colt Seavers, desperately trying to mainline Ryan Reynolds. In a cheesy voice-over he intones, “I can’t complain. I’m working with my dream girl. In the dream job. I’m living the dream.” The dream girl is Jody Moreno (an irritating Emily Blunt), an English camera operator working on a spectacle starring Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an action superstar who owes most of his famous moves to Colt Seavers. He’s a cocky, ungrateful and self-obsessed bastard, defensive of his stardom and unwilling to acknowledge the repercussions of his actions. Colt and Jody, meanwhile, have the oddest of relationships, communicating in hand signals and a staccato badinage replicating the repartee of, say, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. At least it’s a more feasible exchange than the manic overtures of Hannah Waddingham’s hyper movie exec Gail Meyer. But if she’s a caricature, there are broader figures on the landscape as the scene switches from Los Angeles to Sydney and a space opera-cum-cosmic love story called Metalstorm (think of Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens on crack).
Of course, there is an embarrassment of impressive stunts, but as much of the bedlam is pumped up with so much noise, corny dialogue, cheesy flashbacks and predictable turns of plot, the effect is meaningless. Ryan Gosling has recycled a variation of this character many times – the driven, inscrutable loner – but never so impressively than in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). The stunts in that were nerve-shredding – because context was everything. Here, there is one really good scene, in which Colt and Jody discuss the permutations of the split screen, and the shots of Sydney Harbour are nice.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, Teresa Palmer, Stephanie Hsu, Winston Duke, Ben Knight, Matuse, Adam Dunn, Zara Michales, Jason Momoa, Lee Majors, Heather Thomas.
Dir David Leitch, Pro Kelly McCormick, David Leitch, Ryan Gosling and Guymon Casady, Screenplay Drew Pearce, Ph Jonathan Sela, Pro Des David Scheunemann, Ed Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir, Music Dominic Lewis, Costumes Sarah Evelyn, Sound Alan Rankin, Stephen P. Robinson, Ethan Zeitman and Luke Gibleon.
87North Productions/Entertainment 360-Universal Pictures.
126 mins. USA/Australia/Canada. 2024. UK Rel: 2 May 2024. US Rel: 3 May 2024. Cert. 12A.
