Ah, the movies. You gotta love ’em. Director David Leitch is a stuntman turned filmmaker, and his films have always had a self-referential wonder with their own existence. It’s never been more explicit than it is with The Fall Guy, his latest movie starring Ryan Gosling as a stuntman and Emily Blunt as the camera operator turned blockbuster director he’s in love with. It is a romantic comedy at its heart, but considering its characters, Leitch takes the opportunity to fill the film with several action set pieces. A valiant effort at multi-quadrant appeal. In the movie’s opening moments, Gosling narrates a montage of some of Hollywood’s more exciting action films (including Leitch’s Atomic Blonde), and touts the vanity-less importance of the stunt community. It’s not subtle, but also, it’s not trying to be.
Nominally, the film is an adaptation of the 1980s television series of the same name starring Lee Majors as a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter. The movie mostly holds no reverence for the series, and the film’s promotional run has certainly treated it like an original film. Screenwriter Drew Pierce sets the scene: Colt Seavers (Gosling) is the stuntman for the vainglorious movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). He has established job security, even if he doesn’t have Ryder’s basic respect. He does have a budding relationship with an ambitious camera operator named Jody Moreno (Blunt), that gets squandered after a stunt goes terribly wrong and Colt breaks his back. No longer the stuntman extraordinaire, Colt hides away in his Los Angeles home, abandoning the industry, but more importantly, abandoning Jody.
Eighteen months later, Colt is healed physically but still hasn’t returned to stunt work. A call from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) convinces him to come back. The job? Being Tom’s double on the set of Jody Moreno’s directorial debut. An sci-fi action romance, Jody is exorcising her heartbreak over Colt’s disappearance with her movie. When Colt shows up on set in Sydney, she’s clear in her disapproval. She’s only just begun the process of getting over him, and is uninterested in any excuses Colt has to give, while Colt, hoping for a romantic rekindling, must balance the stoic, never-say-no element of his work with his hopes of convincing Jody that his feelings are still pure. Later, Gail explains the real reason she asked Colt to come to the set: Tom Ryder has gone missing and she needs Colt to find him.
The missing Tom Ryder line gives the narrative its main propulsion; it also is the closest the film comes to connecting to its source material. The missing persons aspect of Pierce’s script is a majority of the plot but the least interesting portion of the story. The details of Tom’s disappearance, as they unfold over the course of the film, make little sense as they attempt to steer you away from a twist that’s all too predictable. Taylor-Johnson and Waddingham have moments, but their characters highlight the worst parts of the screenplay, which feels amateurish in its layering of intrigue. When the movie tries to paper over it by having its characters directly address “third act problems”, I knew I was in the hands of a movie that knew things were going wrong and decided not to do anything about it.
As a romantic comedy, The Fall Guy is a hit. Gosling and Blunt are both so phenomenally skilled with comedic timing and romantic chemistry that their scenes together sing. It’s almost shocking that this is the first time they’ve ever worked together. Even the early scenes of Colt and Jody – the inevitable sequences of resentment and anger that we know will transition into reconnection – are funny and fresh in their hands. The movie’s dialogue, filled with so many audience-winking, self-referential allusions would make eyes roll if not delivered by performers who actually know the art of connecting with the audience, and not selling them out for cheap laughs. This is the perfect example of movie stars elevating the material, taking a serviceable script and reminding us that they’re reason you bought the ticket.
Winston Duke has some good scenes as Dan Tucker, Colt’s longtime stunts coordinator and close friend who helps him through the winding plot of mystery and deception. If we’re ever lucky enough to get a standalone starring vehicle for Duke, I think we’d be in for a good time. Dan is the Leitch surrogate, the on-set handler of stunts and stuntmen. Going from doing stunts on The Matrix to producing John Wick to making your own Hollywood blockbusters is no easy feat, and Leitch seems hard-pressed to pay credence to the people he believes got him there. But for all the movie’s reverence for stuntmen, The Fall Guy‘s action set pieces fall mostly flat, a victim to its own inside-baseball conceit. Atomic Blonde was one of the best blends of cinematic style and bon-crunching fight scenes, but in Fall Guy gives us unnecessary visual flair at the expense of exciting choreography. But Leitch made one really smart decision in casting his two leads. This is a movie all about having a good time at the theater. Gosling and Blunt certainly ensure that.
Directed by David Leitch