Movie Review : The Fall Guy (2024)
There is little I relate to more than working in the shadows. It’s neither a good nor a bad thing as long as you find it fulfilling, but working at elevating someone else can feel alienating if that person gets all the benefit from your work. I don't relate at all to the words "comedy" and "romance", but I was onboard with David Leitch's The Fall Guy from the first theatrical trailer for the aforementioned reason. It's also brimming with on screen talent. What can go wrong?
The Fall Guy tells the story of career stunt double Colt Seavers (a god-tiered Ryan Gosling), who gets hired as an emergency replacement for a movie shoot in Australia, eighteen months after he was almost killed in an accident on set. Except that the lead star Tom Ryder (the underrated Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has disappeared and that Colt needs to save the directing debut of his one time girlfriend (the always solid Emily Blunt) who he aggressively ghosted after getting injured eighteen months earlier.
Meta stunts for a self-aware movie
The Fall Guy is, first and foremost, a self-aware action movie. Hollywood folks love to be self-referential and talk about themselves at any opportunity, which is both a strength and a weakness for The Fall Guy. Because a lot of the film revolves around large action sets and stuff that stuntmen usually do in movies. There's a mind bending aspect to watching a stuntman character doing stunts on a movie set (that is technically off the in-movie set) to save a movie that doesn't exist. Meta stunts for a self-aware movie.
When I say that it's both a strength and a weakness, it's because that the stunts take a lot of runtime and are (for the most part) quite conventional. Fights scenes, falls from high places, car chases, etc. A lot of what you'll see in The Fall Guy, you've seen in other movies. There is cool, original stuff though. A fight scene involving a dog DURING a car chase, a boat chase where Ryan Gosling's character Colt has his hands tied behind his back, etc. But that "love letter to stuntmen" thing made the movie longer than it should've been.
Ryan Gosling's god given flair for comedy makes a lot of the long-winded stunt sequences palatable. One of my favorite scenes involved him getting shot by blanks and sneaking up on a token bad guy in a Charlie Chaplinesque way. It make me laugh out loud in the theatre. Self-awareness is a dangerous rope to walk in movies and The Fall Guy loses its footing a number of times, but it is carried by its insane amount of talent. Let's call it a fresh and original spin on a very conventional underdog story.
Let's Talk About Love
My favorite aspect of The Fall Guy was its clever take on romance. It's not revolutionary, but you know how action movies usually frame romance as some sort of Herculean task to overcome? It's not the case here. Emily Blunt's character Jody is not a damsel in distress and the romance angle of The Fall Guy runs parallel to its missing star plot. Making up with Jody is framed as equally important to Colt as honoring his skills as a stuntman in order to reconcile his fragmented self. In other words, it feels real.
It is embodies by the otherworldly chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt that carries through intense, introspective conversation to banter moments. It’s very typical Ryan Gosling humor, but only he can carry it with such rhythm and sincerity. There's a great scene near the beginning where he's pondering his broken relationship with Jody to a Taylor Swift song that will make the most cynical of assholes crack at least smile. Your expectations won't be transcended, but they will be fulfilled.
*
The Fall Guy is nowhere near the level of The Nice Guys in terms of Ryan Gosling-lead action comedy, but it's a solid feel good movie for sensitive dudes like yours truly. It's a good way to spend two hours in a theatre, but I don't think it has immense replay value. It will definitely be part of Ryan Gosling's retrospectives, but it's not the kind of movie you're going to rewatch on a Friday evening for fun. It's not that anything went particularly wrong, but outside of Gosling’s otherworldliness, not much was memorable either.
