The Fall Guy

What’s The Movie? The Ryan Gosling-starring The Fall Guy

What’s It All About, JG? Dunno. Oh all right, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is a stuntman who doubles for famous action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and who is pining after cameraperson Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). When a stunt goes wrong and he breaks his back, Colt vanishes in shame and Jody goes on to become a big-shot director. Eighteen months later, he’s persuaded back into his old job for a sci-fi epic being shot in Sydney and directed by Jody. Under the (false) impression she asked for him, he heads over, only to find the real reason he’s been brought to the set is that Tom has fallen in with a bad crowd and has gone missing and Jody’s film is over budget and in danger of being closed down. Mmm. Anyway, Colt investigates while slowly getting back together with Jody (often very slowly) until he finds out Tom accidentally killed someone and wants to use Colt as the fall guy (heh) to take the blame. The rest of the film is just Tom getting caught by Colt, incriminating himself and producer Gail Myer (Hannah Waddingham), who was in on the conspiracy. And of course, Colt and Jody reconcile. The movie is finished, Jason Mamoa becomes the replacement star in what is presumably meant to be a funny moment, and that’s your lot apart from the inevitable mid-credits scene where Lee Majors and Heather Thomas from the original show crop up for a cameo.

Why Did You Give It A Go? I’d heard reasonably good things about it being a solid movie, enjoyably meta without being too smug, and pretty old-school action fun. So why not? My fella was away for the weekend and I wanted an entertaining beer-and-pizza movie, a good, dumb action movie to fill in the time on a Saturday evening. It certainly managed to fulfill the second of those criteria.

Is It Any Good? No, not really. It’s not terrible but the main problem is that this isn’t a film that Ryan Gosling is very suited for. His standard low-key, just-there style of performance gets lost in a film like this. He’s amiable enough when on screen but he’s not exactly lighting the place up. What The Fall Guy really needs is someone with a big, magnetic screen presence to anchor the film when it rambles on. And boy does it ramble.

Because there’s simply no way this film needs to be two hours long. The mechanics of the plot, such as it is, are very simple. Bloke goes missing, Our Hero needs to track him down and solve the mystery while getting together with The Leading Lady. That’s it. It’s not complex and it doesn’t require 126 minutes of dicking about to get to the punchline. This isn’t even, really, a shaggy dog story where we just go from A to B to C solving bits of the plot. In fact, that’s almost exactly the structure the film needs but instead, we have to constantly stop to cut back to the sci-fi epic in production, or some irrelevant side bit, or something else before we get on with the business of the plot. It’s just all over the place, and not in a fun, anything-can-happen sort of way. It’s just incoherent.

Still, it’s not a complete dud either. The unicorn joke early on in the film is genuinely funny and absolutely deadpan in a way that completely works for the movie. It could have stood to have a lot more of those moments, in fact. And I’m not going to lie, being old and having grown up in the ’80s, I just can’t help but get a bit of a thrill when the Miami Vice theme kicks in at one point during a speedboat stunt. It’s a Pavlovian reaction, really.

Oh, and the dog! The dog, amusingly named Jean-Claude, is actually the MVP of the whole movie. Picked up about halfway through in a thoroughly off-handed manner, Jean-Claude steals every scene he’s in, frequently acts everyone else off the screen and is an absolute delight every moment he’s in shot. He’s a very good boy. A very good boy indeed!

Which is as well, because little else really holds the attention. Emily Blunt clearly isn’t trying a leg here but, because she’s Emily Blunt, she remains pretty watchable. Her slightly flustered, in-over-her-head director works well enough and is a good choice rather than being some hard-ass. She has exactly zero chemistry with Gosling though, which makes the central love story impossible to care about. The whole love story is incredibly hackneyed anyway, with one of those “it could all have been solved in 90 seconds if they’d just talked to each other” misunderstandings that apparently then take a whole film to get past. Eesh.

Most of the rest of the cast are just functional. What Stephanie Hsu is doing in this – other than paying the bills – is anyone’s guess. Her character, Alma, is Tom’s assistant but I literally had to check that on Wiki to remind myself what she did because the film just swallows her whole and she barely even registers as a presence on screen. That’s not her fault, to be clear, it’s just the movie casts an incredibly talented actor in a role and then just does nothing with her at all. Ditto Winston Duke, as Colt’s long-time friend and the very definition of “generic side-kick”. Hannah Waddingham at least seems to be having a blast playing a one-dimensional boo-hiss villain and it’s the type of role the film could stand to have a lot more of but she’s barely on screen before the Big Set-Piece Ending.

So yeah, there’s a very limited amount of stuff to get worked up over here. It’s a shame because in theory this really ought to provide those old-school thrills but, a few moments aside, it never really does. So no, you couldn’t really call this good, unfortunately.

How Many Of These Have You Seen? Well, the last time Ryan Gosling troubled this blog was Barbie and he was pretty terrific in it. I also thought he was fantastic in Bladerunner 2049, the first time I’d actually enjoyed seeing him in anything (Drive might be one of the most over-rated and dull films I’ve ever sat through). So a few. And in terms of the old TV series this film is nominally based on, I remember it from the 80s but don’t have any real lingering nostalgia or affection for it, beyond remembering Lee Majors as being genially charming.

Would You Recommend It? Not really. It’s not hard to see the shape the film should have and that’s one of the big frustrations with it. If this were a tight hour and a half filled with some great stunts and a propulsive narrative alongside a few good jokes it would be a great watch. Indeed, that’s pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. But that’s not what we get.

Instead, there’s the whole “meta” thing of making a movie within the movie. The “sci-fi epic”, Metalstorm, that Jody is directing doesn’t relate or connect to anything else in the film, it’s just the project she’s working on. It doesn’t have anything interesting, or even funny, to say about sci-fi movies or blockbusters, it’s just a bit of whatever. The meta elements aren’t particularly obnoxious or overdone, which they very easily could have been, and indeed there’s one absolutely terrific scene where Colt and Jody are on the phone discussing split screen and how effective it is or isn’t while the film itself goes into split screen. It’s fantastically directed and very witty and again gives an impression of the sort of thing The Fall Guy ought to be doing. But instead, it’s just one bright moment in a sea of nothing. And the way that Tom, the lead actor, is just replaced by Jason Momoa is lightly amusing in the way it suggests that most of those stars are essentially the same and can be swapped out without any big deal but it doesn’t build any kind of criticism or insight from that. It’s just a small (a very small) gag at the end of the film.

And what about the stunts themselves? Because, for a movie that’s all about stunts, what we get on screen never seems all that impressive or all that well-directed. That’s a bit odd, considering this was directed by David Leitch, who helmed the first John Wick movie. But generally, given this is meant to be a back-to-basics approach to action without relying on CGI, things just look OK and rarely better. The big truck stunt through the streets of Sydney looks great, as does the Big Car Jump at the end of the movie but for the rest, there’s just not a lot to get worked up about. Sure, the speedboat stunt looks decent (especially with that helping hand from that Miami Vice theme) but “decent” is a long way from remarkable.

And that’s kind of the thing about The Fall Guy. You can see the intent behind it, and it’s even a decent intent, but in the end, there’s just that unshakable feeling that “that’ll do” is about as much effort as anyone has put into the thing. It desperately wants to be fun but the desperation largely swamps out the fun that’s there to be had. There’s a few bright sparks, a few moments when the film really comes alive, but they’re fleeting and once they pass it’s back into fairly undifferentiated slop while you wait for the next one to come along. The film is too long, too undisciplined, has too little attention paid to it and in the end just can’t quite manage to achieve what it sets itself up for. The main takeaway from The Fall Guy is – Ryan Gosling: he’s no Lee Majors.

Scores On The Doors? 5/10