The Fall Guy
Directed by: David Leitch
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt
Action/Comedy | PG-13 | 2 hr 6 min
By Reed Ripley
The Fall Guy has everything going for it—a star-studded cast featuring Ryan Gosling off a huge Barbie wave and a universally-liked Emily Blunt, a setup blatantly and enthusiastically calling back to action movies from a bygone era, and a spot in the release calendar begging for a fun blockbuster. Unfortunately, the execution just isn’t there.
The Fall Guy suffers from the same problem that plagued Bullet Train, director David Leitch’s most recent film, in that it tries to do so many things all at once. Where Bullet Train suffered from trying to be a John Wick clone nestled within a quirky action comedy (while failing to do either very successfully), The Fall Guy tries to be a romantic comedy nestled within a straightforward action comedy, with a hearty dose of Hollywood homage sprinkled throughout.
Most directly, the film is an open love letter to stunt performers and the Hollywood’s stunt industry at large. That’s an admirable goal, and understandable given Leitch’s background as a stunt performer himself (he and Gosling we tell you as much in a direct message to the audience pre-film). Stunts and stunt coordination are an incredibly overlooked aspect of filmmaking, and some of the greatest scenes put to film could not have happened without hundreds and thousands of hours of backbreaking, strenuous work to capture unmistakable and tangible bits of physicality. As the film explicitly calls out, let’s hand out an Oscar dedicated to stunt work, already.
However, Leitch and Co. dutifully recreated dozens of classic television and movie stunts at the expense of turning out something interesting. There isn’t a stunt in The Fall Guy that you haven’t seen before, or at least not one that sticks out as unique. Again, that’s clearly the point—the film is adapted from an early 80s action TV series, after all—but there’s only so many boat jumps, glass breaks, and tumble work one can watch before a certain level of monotony sets in. Honestly, one of the best stunt scenes in the film was a Blunt-focused close combat scene set in a trailer late in the film, and that was more reminiscent of recent action fare than anything classic.
There are also constant references to film history that fall way on the wrong end of the organic-vs-forced spectrum. The film barely goes a few lines of dialogue without name dropping another movie, and it gets obnoxious quickly. Theoretically, introducing the audience to films of which they wouldn’t otherwise have knowledge is never a bad thing—but when those references cross over into referencing something just for the reference’s sake, it starts to wear on you. We all love movies, but the adage of show-don’t-tell still has meaning.
All that overthinking and overtrying leads to a film that shows its seams and noticeably drags. The film’s driving tension between Gosling’s stuntman and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s leading man takes an incredibly long time to develop, and the eventual plot payoff doesn’t justify the slow buildup. Underlying all this is an attempt at a rom-com throughline between Gosling’s stuntman and Blunt’s first-time director, but the film is pulled in too many directions for that to pay off, either.
Despite all its flaws, The Fall Guy is still a fun time at the movies for those intrepid few who use their precious leisure time to check out what’s playing at the local cinema. Gosling and Blunt are two of the most likable actors going right now, and their involvement significantly raises the film’s floor—it’s just not enough to salvage a script and execution destined to fail.