The Fall Guy
What is the point of the movies? Is it just glossy entertainment for the masses, ignoring artistic substance in favor of momentary emotional appeal? Is it real truth (or at least emotional truth) delivered inside a tasty outside but staying with us because of what it says about us? Or is it both? Even if it is, the sheer narcotic power of it seems to overcome any other positive aspect, not just for the endless individuals watching and writing about it, but the very people making them as well. Caught in jobs that chew them up and spit them out, and ask them to take less for doing so, the magic of the movies is so powerful even the people caught in the worst of its travesties can’t help but come back for more.
Colt Seavers (Gosling) can’t. After a terrible stunt gone wrong Seavers drops out of the business for good (he thinks) to focus on rehabbing himself and not being reminded of the thing he loved which almost killed him. Whether that’s the movies or the lovely camera operator (Blunt) he likes to flirt with is a question he’s not ready to answer yet. He’s so done with it all that the instant his old producer friend Gail (Waddingham) asks him for help he hops on a plane to Sydney to roll cars for Jody’s directorial debut. [Nevermind how she jumped from camera operator to director in just 18 months]. After climbing out of the burning wreck of a car Cole discovers he’s not been brought down to help with stunts but to find the film’s missing star before the film is shut down for good. And if he can rekindle his love affair with Jody and movie making, all the better.
There’s not much more to it than that. An easy, breezy romantic adventure that makes some passing gestures at the language of film and how it works, and some pointed ones at the role (and appreciation) of stunts within the larger production world, but not much else. Which is fine, Gosling and Blunt have such instant chemistry and charm that their scenes exist for them to be talking at each other and the fact that what they’re saying doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter. In the same sense that Colt’s various run-ins with dangerous Australian bodyguards is less about moving any story along and move about giving him a reason to perform a live stunt sequence the old fashioned way, or that the film Jody is agonizing over for emotional truth is a silly cowboy future-western space epic (raising the question of why the fake movies in ‘making of’ films are usually terrible?) much of The Fall Guy is about the happening and not so much what’s going on under the hood.
Which is a strange situation considering how meta the film intends to be, going to great lengths to show how the gags in films are done or the reasons for films to be constructed the way they are. As much as it reveals, it hides; it is a mystery after all. Going and looking for the wayward Ryder (Taylor-Johnson), Colt instead finds a dead body in a tub of ice and a group of increasingly violent mercenary’s trying to track him down and dispose of him as well, shattering poor Colt’s concentration every time he tries to figure out what is happening to him and how to get Jody back. They are, no matter how much The Fall Guy tries to jam them together, two extremely disparate throughlines which do not connect in any organic way and could have used a solid decision which is the focus of the film.
None of which is to say it is boring or unentertaining. It is none of those things. It’s also, except for the rare moments when Colt throws himself into a car to stop it or fights in the back over an overturned dumpster, rarely a Fall Guy movie, suffering through a split personality about what it wants to be. The effort to reconcile these halves slows action down in the end and drags things out to diminishing returns. What it is, is not that different than the weird sci-fi amalgam Metal Storm – something for which its makers have great affection but which ultimately its time has passed.
7/10
Starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Winston Duke, Hannah Waddingham, Ben Knight, Zara Michales, Adam Dunn, Teresa Palmer and Stephanie Hsu. Directed by David Leitch.