Mistakes being dumb for cleverness
“The Fall Guy” is the type of “fun” summer movie that only serves as a sad reminder of all that Hollywood is trying to do away with. In general this overpraised thing isn’t much better than your average piece of Netflix content- it isn’t clever, it’s not very funny, it reads like it was written by a third grader, and dissolves in the memory immediately.
If there’s one piece of good news about it, it’s that Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt make attractive leads worth spending time with, although not as much as this super long piece of drivel would have us do. Based on the old TV show of the same name, “The Fall Guy” stars Gosling as stuntman Colt Severs, who returns to a movie set after taking a year off due to a back injury because the love of his life, Emily Blunt’s Jody, is directing her first feature- a movie that seems to play like a goofy-looking SNL sketch of “Fury Road”.
As said, the two stars are wonderful together, and they would have to be to go through the motions of the tepid dialogue like their first scene together- where we find out that Gosling has ghosted her for a year and she childishly plays out the humiliation of that by shouting into a bullhorn all the details of the relationship and break-up in front of her crew. It’s a painful, unfunny scene used to set them at odds with each other and from there it just devolves into further levels of cutesiness, like a split screen scene later on where the two discuss using split screens. These are the jokes?
And then there’s the plot. The lead actor of the film has gone missing and Jody seems unconscionably unbothered by that. The film’s producer (Hannah Waddingham) on the other hand seems to think Cole, who plays the actor’s stunt double, is so simpatico with him that he can literally figure out where he is. So “The Fall Guy” careens around from being a romantic comedy, to a spoof of a movie within a movie, to a mystery thriller, to a slam-bang action flick with explosions, gunfights, and so on. It's all ridiculously disjointed, and seems ridiculously amused with that fact.
It was directed by David Leitch, one half of the original “John Wick” crew who has gone on to make over-the-top actioners on his own like “Bullet Train”, which I kinda liked. “The Fall Guy” at heart seems to be his homage to stunt performers- those guys who put their bodies on the line and get no Oscars. And Leitch proves once again he’s a director of great style- like a club scene fight which is eye-popping not just for its stunts but for the surrounding aesthetic. But there’s also a lot of winking at the audience here- where it’s clear Gosling isn’t doing his own stunts, where the scenes look haphazardly edited together, and where Leitch makes light of what we’re seeing on screen. In a way this is Leitch giving the real stunt performers their due but considering the lack of coherence or heft to the rest of this movie, it’s also disappointing that the action is also just a joke.
Gosling tries- again playing that handsome-pathetic comic personae he’s been developing since “The Nice Guys”. Just unfortunately for him, screenwriter Drew Pearce is no Shane Black. The dialogue is usually so tame that the actors feel the need to shout it, and this being a film about Hollywood- it resorts again to meta-references of film and TV shows but even then, it just kinda feels like references. Blunt is a nice presence but is treated too tentatively both in terms of action as well as comedy. Waddingham has some fun here, so does Winston Duke and Aaron Taylor Johnson. But all in all this isn’t starting the summer off on a high note, but rather just something that feels way too cute, hollow, and witless for its own good.