The Fall Guy movie review: stunt dribble

There’s a pretty good cheesy-fun-time-at-the-movies movie buried somewhere deep in The Fall Guy. And we know this because we can see hints of that movie in the trailers for the disjointed bloated mess that we actually get if we *ahem* overpay to see The Fall Guy in IMAX at the multiplex.

It’s been a thing — like, for years now — that trailers give away too much of the movie. (Apparently this is what many moviegoers want? So depressing.) It’s also long been a thing that trailers often feature scenes that don’t end up in the final, finished movie. That is just the nature of the beast, a factor of the Hollywood sausage-making: the people who cut trailers are doing so based on the small selection of footage they are given, and this marketing process often happens long before a film has even finished production (that is, the primary filming). And often movies don’t even come together as, like, A Thing, until the editing stage, when the fuckton of footage that has been shot — including multiple alternate takes of scenes and a lot of stuff that will ultimately end up being discarded — is finally assembled into something resembling a coherent and satisfying story.

Or, you know, a story that is technically coherent but just not very satisfying.

Cuz this is where we are with The Fall Guy. It’s not a good movie. It’s a fucking mess that isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is, and drags itself out to a runtime that it is unable to justify. The trailers are infinitely smarter and sharper and funnier and better cut than the movie itself — I want to see the movie those trailers promised, and I cannot recall another film that made me feel this way. The trailer is actually better than the movie? What?

The small charms the actual Fall Guy movie sings with are wholly down to Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who are separately so damn sexy in a sweetly adorable way that you just want to move in with them and curl up on the sofa with a cup of hot chocolate and a puppy, and together spark with the kind of bangin’ chemistry that makes you yearn for a better, sexier movie for them to, well, bang in. (There is no banging in this movie. Sexlessness even in movies meant to be sexy continues to be a 2020s trend.)

Gosling’s (First Man, Blade Runner 2049) Colt Seavers is a stunt man brought in at the last minute to work on the directorial debut of Blunt’s (Oppenheimer, Jungle Cruise) Jody Moreno, a former camera operator getting her big break on a hopefully-gonna-be-blockbuster sci-fi epic. (Nothing in this, for all its faults, still admittedly pleasantly silly movie qualifies as fantasy more than this, that a studio is taking a chance on an untested female director on a big-budget movie. This only happens in the real world to men… and only white men, at that.) They had a fling on a previous project but they went sour. So the moment is tense when Moreno realizes who the new stunt guy on her set is.

But wait. The reason that producer Gail Meyer (Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham: Les Misérables, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) has brought in Seavers in the first place, on impossibly short notice, makes sense only in retrospect, as if she has some sort of psychic foresight about how things are going to play out. (Spoiler: this is bad writing on the part of screenwriter Drew Pearce [Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation].) See, the film’s star, asshole celeb Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson: Bullet Train, Tenet), has disappeared, and Meyer needs Seavers to find him. This goes sour too, at least for Seavers. Most importantly for us in the audience, it means that Seavers spends most of the movie running around Sydney trying to solve the mystery of the missing movie star and therefore not cutely, sexily sparring with Moreno, which is pretty much all we needed from this movie.

So right there is one big problem: the stars of this movie, who have delicious chemistry together, are barely onscreen at the same time. Which feels downright criminal. (Also downright criminal: this movie does not understand the appeal of Hannah Waddingham and misuses her terribly.)

So that plugs into the other big problem here: this is not a romantic comedy with a bit of action tossed in, it’s an action movie that makes a few halfhearted feints toward romantic comedy, and poorly so. Oh, did you think that Emily Blunt deserved another go at an action flick after her incredibly badass turn in Edge of Tomorrow? Well, she sure does… but this ain’t it. Moreno isn’t even a protagonist here, as much as Blunt’s force of personality might fool you into thinking she is.

The Fall Guy feels like the movie equivalent of “everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer.” Because the director here, David Leitch (Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde), is a former stuntman and stunt coordinator, and while he can direct stunt action well — not that there’s anything particularly fresh or original in the stunt action here, though it is copious and mildly diverting — there are very few movies that don’t need more than stunt action, and this movie is not one of them. (There is an argument to be made that stunt performers deserve more acclaim than they have gotten, and I am 100-percent behind that, but this brilliant promo for the movie does that better than the movie itself.)

What we’re left with are a lot of attempts at self-referential, movie-within-a-movie humor, not least of which is when someone says, “Colt, you’re the fall guy” for the criminal stuff that is inevitably going down, and… wow (and not in a good way, to quote Seavers). The script is long on exposition, and no, this is not excusable because someone snarkily drops a comment about the movie they’re making also being long on exposition. There’s nowhere near enough leaning into the clearly craptacular junkfest movie that Moreno is directing, which is called Metalstorm and already has the tagline “It’s High Noon at the End of the Universe,” which looks and sounds like Rebel Moon–esque garbage and is — though no one breathes a hint of this — clearly an uncalled-for remake of a real 1983 movie of the same name and of the same tagline. Maybe that’s some self-reference to the fact that this Fall Guy is loosely based on an 80s TV series of the same name that starred Lee “Six Million Dollar Man” Majors, that no one remembers, that has had zero pop-cultural impact, and that no one was asking for a reboot of?

It all feels like we got a movie made from the first dashed-off draft of a script, one with some messed-up temporal issues: How is Gosling’s character possibly old enough to have worked on the Miami Vice TV show, which ended in 1989 when Gosling was nine years old? (Seavers wears a Miami Vice stunt-crew jacket, which is a very cool piece of outerwear, but still: he talks about his experience on the show, which quite literally cannot have happened.) Maybe this is a factor of how pop-culture nostalgia has gotten compressed in time, and that’s why there’s a ton of 80s rock on the soundtrack. Not that I’m complaining about 80s rock per se; as an early GenXer, 80s rock is definitely my jam. But it feels weirdly out of place here in the same way that Glenn Miller swing would have felt out of place in, say, 1988’s Die Hard. Not that it’s not great music, but what is its presence trying to convey?

Or is The Fall Guy indulging in the temporal dissonance we’ve seen so much of: the pretending that we have not been living through a pandemic of an airborne virus? No one on the Metalstorm set is wearing a face mask, even though big-budget Hollywood productions are one of the few environments where the majority of people are still masking in 2024, if for no other reason, because the financial stakes are so high. Sucks for your bottom line if your very expensive movie star — or even a majority of your anonymous but highly skilled crew — is sidelined for weeks by a BSL3-level virus. So is this movie set not today but five or ten or more years ago?

I am all for escapism — Christ, I wish we could leave these past four years behind us — but goddamn, The Fall Guy ain’t it.

more films like this:
• Game Night [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• True Lies [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Hulu US | Disney+ UK]