In this hit-you-over-the-head love letter to the stunt community of Hollywood, former stunt man, stunt coordinator and now director David Leitch (Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train, Hobbs & Shaw) has brought to the big screen an exceedingly loose adaptation of the 1980s series The Fall Guy, which starred Lee Majors as stunt man Colt Seavers who made some extra cash by taking on bounty hunter work on the side. This film version has nothing to do with bounty hunting, but it has a lot to do with shining the spotlight brightly on the difficult and dangerous work that stunt teams do on movie sets.
The film opens with Seavers (played by Ryan Gosling), a hardened stunt double for pompous action-movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who does not do his own stunts but claims that he does. Colt is in the early throes of a romantic entanglement with camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) when he is severely hurt doing a stunt fall from several stories up. He goes into seclusion and abruptly ends the relationship, feeling like a failure and someone Jody wouldn’t want to be involved with. We catch up with him more than a year later, when he's working as a valet for a posh Beverly Hills restaurant. But when Ryder’s producing partner Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham, Ted Lasso) tracks him down, she lays out a comeback path that includes working on a massive sci-fi action movie called MetalStorm, filming in Australia, starring Ryder, and being directed by Jody, whom Gail says asked for Colt personally (the first of many lies she tells in the film).
The Fall Guy is a classic example of a dumb movie with a plot that is far too complicated for its own good. Almost as soon as Colt is back on board (under stunt coordinator Dan Tucker, played by the great Winston Duke), Ryder goes missing and Gail secretly recruits Colt to go looking for him, which immediately leads to trouble. Obviously, there’s more afoot than an actor simply disappearing, and over the course of a couple of hours, Colt unravels a couple big mysteries while also trying to patch things up with Jody, reducing Blunt to the role of reactive girlfriend and not much of a woman of action until the last few minutes of the movie—one of the film’s many disappointing elements.
As mentioned before, the real point of The Fall Guy is to show off stunt work, which it does faithfully and dutifully. During the film’s end credits, spectacular footage of the real stunt teams on this movie are shown performing all of the major action sequences, and I’d rather have just watched two hours of the behind-the-scenes material than this bloated, sloppy, underdeveloped mess.
Written by Drew Pearce (Hobbs & Shaw), the films zig-zags from action movie to crime drama to rom-com so violently, it’ll make your neck hurt. And as game and able as Gosling and Blunt are (and the film is never better than when we’re just watching the two of them play together), the material they’re given is garbage warmed over. Characters played by very talented actors, like recent Oscar-nominee Stephanie Hsu and Teresa Palmer, come in, do whatever it is they’re supposed to do, and then vanish almost for the rest of the movie. At a certain point in the film, people are trying to kill Colt because he knows something he isn’t supposed to about Ryder’s disappearance, and the lengths that the killers go to get him are so public and large in scale, there’s no possible way they could have gotten away with it. I don’t need my action movies to be fully believable (for example, defying physics is a cornerstone of them), but at least let the film be set on planet earth if you’re going to ask me to stretch my imagination a bit.
Of course it’s ridiculous that there isn’t some kind of stunts category at the Academy Awards, and this film makes a compelling case for just such an update. The film also recognizes the great work stunt people do in live stunt shows at theme parks. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the stunt work in The Fall Guy; it’s everything around it that lets the movie (and the audience) down. It’s a smoke show, and when the smoke clears, there’s really nothing there to hang your fedora on, aside from two very good-looking leads flailing like their lives depended on it.
The film is now in theaters.
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