Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Leitch
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, Stephanie Hsu, Winston Duke
I've long believed that with a few exceptions (most notably Walter Hill's
48 Hrs), if you're making an action comedy it's wiser to place it in the hands of
a comedy director rather than an action filmmaker. A good comedy director
will be able to mine laughs from an action star, but an action filmmaker
will struggle to make a comedian convince as an action star.
The Fall Guy is an action comedy directed by an action
filmmaker, David Leitch (Bullet Train;
Atomic Blonde). It's an odd choice as despite being a movie about a stuntman, it's
roughly 95% a comedy and only 5% an action movie. The action only really
comes in the climax and a mid-movie chase scene. For the most part it's a
screwball comedy, one that has more in common with '80s shows like
Hart to Hart and Moonlighting than with the show
it actually purports to be adapting. That said, it has none of the charm of
Hart to Hart and certainly none of the great writing that
defined Moonlighting.
It's no surprise to find The Fall Guy bears little
resemblance to the original show, as these things rarely do. Its protagonist
is a stuntman but that's really all it has in common with its TV source.
Played by Ryan Gosling, Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers is no longer
a bounty hunter here, and Jody (Emily Blunt) isn't a stunt performer
but a movie director. In the original show Colt and Jody had a strictly
platonic relationship, with Colt something of a father figure to Jody. Here
Colt and Jody are lovers. The series' other key characters - Colt's comic
relief cousin Howey and his boss Big Jack - are conspicuously absent. It's
yet another case of adapting a property simply for its brand name
recognition. At least we get the iconic theme tune over the end
credits.
The film opens with an impressive "oner" that ends with Colt falling from a
height and breaking his back. He subsequently becomes known as "the fall
guy," geddit? Ugh. For some reason which the film never makes a convincing
case for, Colt ends his relationship with doting camera operator Jody and
retires from the stunt biz, taking a demeaning job as a car valet. Then he
receives a call from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) pleading
for him to get back in the stunt saddle and fly to Australia where Jody is
shooting her first movie as a director. Seeing it as a chance to rekindle
their romance, Colt accepts, only to find Gail has an ulterior motive. The
movie's leading man, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has vanished
and Gail wants Colt to track him down. Wait, didn't Colt break his back? How
on Earth will he be ab...shush now.
What follows is an experience akin to watching two hours of deleted scenes
from a better, more focussed film. Every scene is a couple of minutes longer
than it needs to be, and the film smugly leans into bad jokes and runs them
into the ground. There's a sequence that sees Colt get accidentally drugged,
resulting in his hallucinating a unicorn everywhere he goes. It's mildly
amusing the first time we see the creature, but the movie insists on
repeating this image ad nauseum, like a dad who just can't accept that his
teenage daughter simply doesn't find his jokes funny.
Gosling and Blunt are individually charming, and with their beaming smiles
and sparkling baby blues you can't help but look at them and think "Now
that's a movie star!" But there's a notable lack of chemistry in their many
scenes together. They don't so much flirt with one another as flirt at each
other. Leitch appears out of depth when it comes to handling comedy, and
many of the rambling scenes give the impression that he just let his stars
improv and hoped for the best. The dialogue is atrocious, and if ever a
movie needed a script polish by Shane Black, it's this one. The biggest
issue is that there's a lack of conflict in the relationship between Colt
and Jody because she practically agrees to take him back as soon as he
arrives in Australia. The sort of sexually tense bickering that fuels the
best rom-coms is as a result, completely absent.
What's most surprising is how little action is on screen. What we do get is
underwhelming. There's a chase scene on the streets of Sydney that could
have been exhilarating, but the film makes the terrible decision to intercut
it with a conversation between Jody and Gail, which kills its momentum. The
final climactic scene is like all of these films' climactic sequences - just
a lot of stuff and noise, with nothing that's going to stand out in the
annals of action cinema.
At one point Colt jokes with a visual FX artist about having his face
replaced by Tom Cruise. This only serves to make us think about how much fun
this might have been if Cruise had been involved in the project. Now there's
someone who understands both action and comedy.
