The Fall Guy is all about stunt work, on the kinetic and eye-popping surface as well as at its narrative core. Based on the ‘80s TV show about the perilous, thrilling, and machismo-encoded day job of the Hollywood stuntman life, but with a vastly higher budget, and directed by former stuntman David Leitch, The Fall Guy earns our money and attention on a purely visual and visceral level.
On another front, the film’s tangled but clever plotline tries to achieve its own kind of intellectual stunt work, marrying a film-within-a-film story — about the oscillating love affair of a stuntman (Ryan Gosling) and a first-time director (Emily Blunt) — with the baser demands of action cinema cliches on the bristling, hair-raising surface. Remarkable stunts are the star of this show, especially welcome in the age of CGI digital fairy dust, and the action film of black-hat villains and white-hat heroes — without distracting shades of moral gray in the characters — doom the film to a certain static quality.
Development and production of the film have been in motion for a few years, but the timing of its release neatly capitalizes on the odd coupling of Gosling and Blunt, from opposing camps of the “Barbenheimer” summer blockbuster wars. The pair took advantage of their supposed “rivalry” during a sassy Oscar bit, setting up a tribute to the often thankless tasks of stunt performers’ work.
A similar setup job is embedded in the film’s plot, in which the pair attempt to work on the action “sci-fi epic romance” film Metalstorm, but are warded off by various sinister forces. The villainy team includes the Machiavellian action star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) whom Gosling is doubling, an über-scheming producer (Hannah Waddingham) and a motley crew of thugs with very bad intentions. It all reaches comic-book-ish proportions.
Quentin Tarantino’s ingenious saga Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Brad Pitt in the imaginatively concocted epicenter as a stuntman between existential roles, managed its own kind of magic trickery, thanks to Tarantino’s wild cinematic imagination and rewired Hollywood fetishism. The Fall Guy falls, by comparison. But it keeps us tuned in through the breezy, winking chemistry of Gosling and Blunt, through regular witty fourth-wall nods (hey, there’s Lee Majors, Heather Thomas, and current action star Jason Momoa making cameos!) and a veritable circus of “how’d they do that?” stunts and chase scenes that just won’t quit.
Sorry, Ken, The Fall Guy doesn’t rise to the crafty balancing act of high-low, pop-art culture of Barbie, but it succeeds as a game genre-twister good enough to get us into the multiplex in the off-season. See the trailer here.
