3 out of 5

Directed by: David Leitch

There’s a much better, longer, and presumably already written analysis that situates the meta action romcom The Fall Guy into the ripple effect of film zeitgeist springing out of John Wick, and further connecting that to what led to John Wick, as well as the kind of 80s action drivel The Fall Guy nods to – not to mention its 80s TV series loose inspiration. There are already hats on hats inherent in that lineage / description, and further hats added as the movie exposits its agenda of highlighting the efforts of the forever unsung Hollywood stuntpeople, and keeps adding to the stack with a story that is told during the making of a movie, and so very obviously (“cleverly”) gets to comment on its own plot and conceits as it goes along.

Crafted by the producer / co-director of the first Wick flick, and maker of some notable actioners thereafter, and starring the irrepressibly charming Ryan Gosling as the perfectly named Colt Seavers, stuntman for Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) – a nicely balanced hodgepodge of any given full-of-themselves action star you might think of – as long as you’re not negatively triggered by either of those Wick / Gosling quotients, The Fall Guy will have no trouble appealing: purposefully toned with 80s / 90s DTV bravado, the movie’s glossy action and mix of continually escalating nonsense plot with glance-and-you-get-it tropes makes for a truly made-to-please blend of casual and cult viewing… if you’ll excuse how ‘cult’ might apply to a $125 million dollar movie starring huge names, though see my hat-on-hat prattle above, and I’ll touch on this again soon.

Gosling voice-overs to us about the magic of movie making, until a big stunt goes way wrong and we cut to 18 months later – his Seavers is now disheveled, working as a valet, and has let his romance with fellow film worker Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) go dormant. But!: Jody has now become a director, and wants – according to smarmy producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) on set for the stuntwork. That’s not actually the case, of course, which a series of romcom miscommunications quickly tells us, and the re-meet cute of the duo is doubled down as Seavers ends up getting involved with an extracurricular plot of missing movie stars, drug deals, dead bodies, superhero dogs, gigantic explosions and more, with the lines humorously blended between action “done for the cameras” and “real” action, which are both in quotes because this is all a movie about making a movie.

Now, maybe you thought of The Stunt Man somewhere along the way, the fantastically inside-out action comedy satire from 1980. …Don’t. The Fall Guy certainly inherits some of the purposeful cheek and indulgences of that flick, but it’s otherwise of entirely different genes: those bred from the last two generations of Marvel movies; the rising appreciation of stunt work – thanks to Wick – the way viewership has changed with second screens and streaming; a much wider cinematic “education” of the audience; and the way that all of this has led to a very, very linear path for many, many films, even when they’re conceptually quite clever. There’s a version of The Fall Guy that’s shorter by a half hour, and that doesn’t wait to make sure you get it when there’s a split screen scene and the two leads discuss the merits of split screen; that doesn’t confuse leaning into tropes with relying on them; and that doesn’t suffer from the inevitable ante-up nature of action, where we’re four Wicks in and it’s hard to continue to craft a spectacle that feels like one. None of this is the direct fault of The Fall Guy, of course, which accomplishes all it sets out to do and does it magnificently, but there’s also no magic to it, really: instead of feeling like a cure to movie malaise, it ends up feeling like just another entry in a run of pretty good popcorn flicks, Marvel ones included. On the one hand, that’s exactly the point, but on the other hand, those are so many damn hats that you wish it could’ve made better use of them.

I really enjoyed The Fall Guy. Though from the trailers onward, it registered as a movie that I’d already seen before. “Yeah, it was good,” you reckon, and maybe in an era when we’re flipping through channels, you pause on it. But then you see that one of the movies its learned from is on, and you flip to that instead.