Despite David Leitch’s background as a stunt actor and coordinator, not to mention the fact that his co-directorial debut, John Wick, set a bar for hard-hitting action, there’s been a certain weightlessness to every film he’s made since his sophomore film, Atomic Blonde. From Deadpool 2 to Bullet Train, they all glide along as briskly and smoothly as, well, a bullet train. They’re sleek, sure, but they’re also free of any heft or tactile quality.
The Fall Guy, then, is a modest improvement, in that there’s at least a sense of physicality to some of its action sequences, though that’s to be expected: As this is a film about the making of a movie, so much of the action that we’re watching has yet to be beefed up by chaotic editing and CGI noise. And thanks to magnetic performances by Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, there’s a charmingly romantic undercurrent that actually withstands the barrage of snarky one-liners and overabundance of self-reflexive quips that draw parallels between the sci-fi action film that their characters, Colt and Jody, are making together and the precarious state of their relationship.
That relationship began 18 months earlier when Colt, a stuntman, and Jody, a stunt coordinator, became intensely involved while making a different film together. But after suffering a debilitating on-set accident that put him in the hospital, Colt changed his phone number and disappeared altogether—a decision that Drew Pearce’s screenplay slyly connects back to the mentality necessary to being a stuntperson. Flash forward to the making of Jody’s directorial debut, MetalStorm, and after Colt shows up on set thanks to the meddling of producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), sparks fly anew between them.
The Fall Guy is at its most fun as Jody and Colt butt heads on the set of MetalStorm, but just as the film has settled into a comfortable groove, Gail enlists Colt’s help in finding her now-missing star, obnoxious fuckboi Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Indeed, as Colt becomes increasingly separated from Jody during his quest to find Tom, whom he’s long been stunt-doubling for, The Fall Guy morphs into a far more banal action film. While Gosling’s star power and killer comedic timing is a constant throughout, none of the cleverness found in The Fall Guy’s portrait of on-set interrelationships is anywhere to be found in the stretches of the film that see Colt rubbing shoulders and going mano a mano with stock baddies.
As a paean to stuntpeople, the film abounds in scenes that highlight the difficulty of stuntwork, with Colt smashing through countless windows and involved in fights and crashes in cars and trucks as well as on boats, metros, and helicopters. But ironically, it’s when he’s performing those stunts on set with Jody that they most impress, as we see the gargantuan efforts that are made by cast and crew to make them safe and feel authentic. Whenever Colt is off set, and thus away from Jody, the movie magic, in every sense of the phrase, dissipates, leaving us with a bland, derivative action-comedy that’s never quite as funny or thrilling as it thinks it is.
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