Director: David Leitch
Writer: Drew Pearce
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Synopsis: A down-and-out stuntman must find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend’s blockbuster film.
The Fall Guy seems to have caused an epidemic of random masses of people grabbing their stomachs and laughing from their guts to their hearts’ content. Now, some of the jokes in The Fall Guy by Ryan Gosling do work; he always had an underappreciated comic delivery. It’s like when good-looking people make a joke, and you laugh because they are beautiful and want their eyes to keep piercing your soul. For example, if Jennifer Connelly told me a joke, I’d proclaim her the next Miriam Maisel.
However, Drew Pearce’s script is not as amusing or clever as he thinks it is or can be. The final product has its moments, but for all intents and purposes, it is a bombastic misfire that’s a recycled effort of ’90s action film plots, thinly bearded with a constant barrage of stunts that lack the visceral quality you would expect from a director who cut his teeth as a stunt work coordinator, David Leitch. The special effects look more like Leitch’s Hobbs & Shaw than his (uncredited) work on John Wick.
If The Fall Guy is a love letter to stunt men and women, then it is a spurious one.
The story follows Colt Seavers (Gosling), a stuntman who has the world on a string. The man loves his job. Colt is primarily a stunt double for the world’s biggest action star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). He is also dating a beautiful camera operator and aspiring director, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). All three are working on Rider’s latest action spectacular when Seavers suffers a terrible accident and quits the business for good.
Colt is now parking cars at a restaurant for all the free burritos he can eat. That is until he gets a call from a big Hollywood producer, Gail Meyer (Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham), who needs his help. Jody is now helming her first feature film, and Ryder has gone missing. Gail tells Colt he must locate Ryder within 48 hours, or the studio will shut down the movie for good. This means that Jody, the love of his life, may never get another chance to realize her dream.
Now, please repeat the plot of The Fall Guy to yourself again. Then ask yourself, why does a prominent Hollywood studio executive want to call a former stuntman from halfway across the world to investigate, in a foreign land, with zero investigative skills, to find a Tom Cruise-level actor before the studio does? This is, I do not know, uh, yeah, the word I think would be stupid. Why did Gail not hire a private investigator on her own? Has it ever crossed her mind?
This is a contrived plot, but if you have seen almost any ’90s mystery action thriller, the plot is so well thought out that you know precisely who the yet-to-be-unveiled villain will be almost immediately. And yes, the film never connects the television plot where Colt moonlights as a bounty hunter in the film’s script. This makes that mistake even more galling, even if the director is banking on audiences not to question it because of the action and star wattage on screen. I’m sure this part was left out in case they want to make a sequel for franchise purposes.
The Fall Guy is about a good 30 minutes too long. There are a few mirror-scene transition issues; you don’t necessarily need to learn about stunt work. The audience is smart enough to realize that several scenes begin to become apparent fillers and distractions due to the lack of story and plot. For instance, the scene with Teresa Palmer fighting Gosling’s Seavers for no reason is a waste of time. Academy Award nominee Stephanie Hsu pushes a minor plot point but introduces the scene-stealing Aussie Kelpie. Surprisingly, the recurring joke with the canine comic doesn’t get old fast and is more of a satirical commentary on the stunt work of dogs in movies.
The Fall Guy is not without its charms, especially the chemistry between Gosling and Blunt, even comedically. Frankly, Gosling has chemistry with everyone, including the banter between the star and Nine Day’s Winston Duke and begging Taylor-Johnson’s Ryder to eat some fat and glucose to help with his cognitive skill set. The film has a wonderful comic energy and attitude that can be infectious, but in this case, less would have been more. The soundtrack is stellar, with a meticulously inspired needle drop placed in almost every big action scene.
The big scene the film leads up to captures the film’s essence, and the wink to the industry joke before the credits with a special guest star will draw laughs and cheers. I even enjoyed the teamwork of stunt team workers behind the scenes to help Colt and Jody accomplish their goals. Yet, it comes back to the plot that makes the film unbalanced.
For instance, there is a clever scene with a piece of evidence where Hollywood technology is used to frame someone. Yet, everyone is so focused on silencing the “patsy” that no one bothers to ask themselves how they would silence the ten witnesses to the issue, making the effort pointless. There’s also a plot point where bad guys are looking for a witness hiding but then working in plain sight, yet the bad guys never think about looking for them in the exact spot where they would be.
If you like your films with some thoughtless errors but still some mindless and charming fun, The Fall Guy will most likely scratch that itch. If you need something smarter from Hollywood popcorn films, The Fall Guy will be an amusing diversion that ultimately will leave you disappointed.
