The new Ryan Gosling vehicle The Fall Guy is, as stuntman-turned-director David Leitch has said, “a love letter” to the stunt industry. It’s a business model that can use some love. In the trades and on the picket lines in recent years, there has been much chatter of artificial intelligence replacing flesh-and-blood stunt performers with digital replicas. In this environment, The Fall Guy feels like a knowing elegy —premature, but not by much — for an endangered skill set.
It’s also a fun, if formula-bound, action-comedy that leaves this existential crisis largely unspoken. But even on its surface, the movie is something of a relic, right down to the Miami Vice jacket that becomes a cheeky plot device. Drew Pearce’s screenplay was loosely inspired by the ABC-TV series of the same name, which ran from 1981 to 1986, so don’t be surprised if you detect strong ’80s vibes from the movie’s inception, with its unfashionable (and unnecessary) voice-over narration from Gosling’s Colt Seavers, an immaculately tousled, cocksure stunt worker who is “living the dream,” as his disembodied voice boasts. He loves his job, as stunt double to the biggest actor in Hollywood, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and he’s crazy about his girlfriend and co-worker, camera operator and aspiring filmmaker Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). His living reverie is interrupted when an on-set accident leaves him with a broken back, a bitter heart and a life in the shadows.
Most of the story is set 18 months later, when Ryder’s producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), rescues Colt from oblivion with an offer he can’t refuse: His ex-flame Jody is shooting her debut film, a Dune-ish sand-and-saucers sci-fi epic called Metal Storm, and she needs Colt to save the movie’s stunt-scape. And, perhaps, if Gail can enlist Colt to ferret out the whereabouts of Ryder, the movie’s star that has suddenly become MIA, then his presence is all the more welcome.
At its core, The Fall Guy is a rom-com, and it’s never better than when it sits back and enjoys the repartee of its two undeniably charming leads. Neither Jody nor Colt have gotten over the circumstances of their severed relationship, of which Colt is singularly responsible, and Pearce and Leitch have a lot of fun with the characters’ evolving power dynamic now that Jody is in the director’s chair. The Fall Guy might not be a touchstone of progressive cinema — it barely passes the Bechdel test — but has there been another American feature with a working female filmmaker as a central character? I can’t think of one.
As Jody and Colt’s dormant feelings gradually ripen, the detective-story subplot tends to suck the oxygen out of their remarriage story, as it were. Colt is roped into a conspiracy that shrewd viewers will solve well before the third-act revelation. But even at its most dramatic, The Fall Guy is agreeably unserious, a live-action cartoon and a harmless enough scaffold for its increasingly elaborate and ridiculous set pieces.
The plot is definitely overwrought, speeding into one false climax of Mission: Impossible proportions after another. The film is nothing if not excessive, even recycling some of its own jokes. Colt’s canine companion, a dog that speaks French and has been trained to attack a certain part of the male reproductive anatomy, overstays its welcome by third time it lunges at a bad guy’s crotch.
But there’s something steadily gratifying about the way The Fall Guy foregrounds the artifice of filmmaking, often with the visual wit of silent comedy. The most memorable close-quarters action takes place in Ryder’s trinket-filled palatial home, with its many prop swords and firearms from various productions, whose false deployment as actual weapons is a recurring gag. Characters speak often in self-aware shopworn movie quotes, and other meta ribaldry abounds. “You’re really into yourself,” one character observes of Colt, winkingly acknowledging Gosling’s pop-culture persona.
The diminishing number of stunt workers who see The Fall Guy will likely come away with even more inside-baseball references. For their own professional sake, let’s hope they don’t view the movie as a period piece.
THE FALL GUY. Director: David Leitch; Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Teresa Palmer, Stephanie Hsu, Winston Duke; Distributor: Universal; Rated PG-13; Opens Friday nationwide