THE FALL GUY (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Fall Guy, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 2, 2024

It comes as a pleasant yet disappointing surprise to see some behind-the-scenes footage during the end credits of The Fall Guy. We watch as stunt performers pull off all the action from the movie for real. Technically, all of those setpieces are in the movie, of course, but because of a series of confounding choices by the filmmakers, they just don't look real in the movie itself.

The whole project, an adaptation of a 1980s TV series, is a miscalculation. It has a somewhat neat premise, as a Hollywood stunt performer has to fight and pull off feats of derring-do in the real world as he investigates a mystery, but the plot's a mess. The fact that Drew Pearce mocks that occasionally, in one of multiple self-referential jokes that want us to know how clever they are, doesn't help. It just reminds us that the movie is content with the bare minimum, while not even succeeding on that level.

Our hero is Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), whose career is seemingly cut short during a one-take prologue that follows the stuntman up a long ride in an elevator and down a too-fast drop. A year and a half later and after somehow recovering to peak physical condition from a broken back and spirit, Colt gets a call. First-time director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) has specifically requested that he come to Syndey to be the key stunt performer on the science-fiction actioner she's shooting there. We already know Colt and Jody were dating at the time of his accident, and still carrying a flame for her, he agrees.

The first setup is that Jody doesn't know the movie's producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) offered Colt the gig. The director is still upset that Colt disappeared and never contacted her following the accident, even though she was desperate to help him through it. The two of them bicker and banter and reconnect over the course of the shoot, by way of scenes like a very public argument disguised as a discussion about the screenplay and a split-screen phone conversation that's ostensibly about the merits of split-screen scenes. Gosling and Blunt are charming actors, but given material as forced and insincere in its jokes as this, there's not much they can do salvage the attempted romance of the story.

It is, after all, far too busy with everything else to focus on these characters anyway. The plot has Gail asking Colt to find Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the movie's leading man, who has disappeared without a trace. The actor has become involved with some dubious locals, so Colt has to follow the Tom's trail, leading him to drug dealers, goons that are trying to kill or abduct him, and a dead body in a hotel room.

None of this actually matters, which is apparent from how convoluted it is and made more irritating when the characters flat-out tell us how unnecessarily complicated the mystery, the cover-up, and the assorted double-crosses are. Pearce spends a lot of time unraveling the puzzle regardless, seemingly unaware that characters spouting a bunch of exposition isn't made more tenable by another character noting what he's doing.

All of it's an excuse for a string of action sequences, which are surprisingly sporadic, considering the premise, and undone by director David Leitch's tendency to edit the danger, thrill, and realism out of them. Some of that is just a matter technique, but part of the problem with a movie being too self-aware is that it heightens our focus on that technique.

The movie constantly reminds us of the excitement and peril of executing stunts for the movies, but these sequences offer none of that. They're choppily edited, letting us see the seams, and given digital flourishes that make them look like technical fakery, even if, as that footage at the end proves, they were accomplished practically. There's a chase through the streets, for example, that sends a large garbage bin spinning behind a truck and later has Colt surfing on a chunk of metal. It's much more impressive to watch how the effect, with actual stunt performers, was pulled off than to note all the effects used to try to convince us that Gosling is present throughout the scene.

The Fall Guy gives us a lousy mystery, an unconvincing romance, and a style of comedy that thinks pointing out how a funny a joke should be somehow makes it funny. Much of that could be forgiven if the movie pulled off its action—the one thing it repeatedly tells us is the whole point of this endeavor. That it doesn't even accomplish that, even with the abundance of resources and talent on the stunt side it shows us, is baffling.

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