The Fall Guy is actually brilliant. How on earth this does not make all the money?
Watched
The Fall Guy last night with the family, as part of my ongoing servitude to Ryan Gosling.
A stuntman falls in love with a camera operator then suffers an on-set accident, and disappears from the world. 18 months later, he's brought back to save the film this camera operator is now directing. The actor the stuntman doubles for has gone missing, and the stuntman is tasked with finding him before the studio finds out and pulls the plug. Basically.
The good: an action-packed, entertaining, at times very funny, romantic comedy with compelling leads with tons of range. It's basically a love letter to stunt performers. Blunt is great. Gosling is great, possibly the greatest actor of his generation (or any generation). They have great chemistry. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was good as the Matthew McConnnaughey-esque dipshit actor. (Taylor-Johnson was the titular Kick-Ass, and is unrecognizable here).
The bad: I think they went too "meta" and were self-aware to the point of undermining their own stakes (that they relentlessly tried to raise). For example, they mention Comic Con and Hall H multiple times (as a goal for the film they are making), they reference a Miami Vice boat stunt, the stunt coordinator constantly says lines from old movies to Gosling (Rocky, Fast 'n Furious, Last of the Mohicans) but it's mildly amusing the first time and wearying by the 3rd 4th and 5th time. Hannah Waddingham plays the same annoying character she played on Ted Lasso, except she dials the annoying campy vampy horseshit up to 11. She had way too much screen time and was awful. The "plot" such as it is, is largely nonsensical, but not sure what anyone was expecting from a movie version of an 80s TV show about a stuntman bounty hunter.
The ugly: The overall problem with this film is it feels like it's been committee-d to death. Too many cooks. The tone makes the whole film feel like a low-stakes spoof, so when they try to amp up the stunts/action/danger, you never buy into it. Gosling's stuntman does the works: high falls, fire SFX, fight choreography, car jumping, you name it, but in this film-within-a-film he does it on the spot with zero prep (yes I get that it's a movie, but he shows up jet lagged without having read the script and immediately they light him on fire and smash him against a rock, 5 or 6 times). The problem with this movie in general is that we have "seen" a ton of crazy shit through CGI that didn't actually require amazing stonework, so when we see someone in this movie do a 150 foot high fall, or jump a car 200 feet, it's not apparent how amazing it is (if it is amazing at all). Lee Majors and Heather Thomas from the TV show have a cameo, which is...
something.
Soundtrack was annoying AF, except for one part: the scene with Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" was really good. Elsewhere, they use a bunch of old incongruous rock songs (Kiss, The Darkness, Phil Collins, ACDC) and I'm not sure who that was supposed to appeal to, or why. Similar to referencing Miami Vice in the film - were they referencing the movie or the TV show, and other than shoehorning a boat stunt in, why? Who listens to Phil Collins in 2024? Or the motherfecking Darkness, a bad joke even when they first appeared? This led to tonal confusion. Incongruous does not equally zany or wacky hijinks.
I think the tone they were going for was something along the lines of Romancing The Stone, or maybe even Die Hard, where it's fun, fast, silly, and the danger is never
too dangerous. 129 minutes is a bit indulgent, but I see now on the imdb page that there is an "extended cut with all new bonus scenes!" with an additional 20 minutes. 20 minutes more! I think anything over 2 hours has to be tight, and you have to really earn every single minute after the 2 hour mark, and this movie was not that.
Family friendly fare rating: 8/10
Normal movie goer rating: 6/10
