The best thing I can say about “The Fall Guy” is that had the movie been three minutes shorter, my mother and I could have perished in a car wreck that occurred just past the stoplight we were waiting at. Then again, the film doomed me to three more minutes of the same unfunny, self-aware action-comedy dreck that I’ve been waiting for Hollywood to move away from since it started getting popular. So am I really better off?
Perhaps I’m being too harsh on a very earnest film that clearly has a lot of love for industry folk who are so often not given their due. But I have to wonder why so much time, effort, money, and passion was wasted on something so bland, so predictable, so… bad. David Leitch's tribute to the stunt community has its heart in the right place, but there is a shocking dearth of creativity here. For a film whose subject is the people who risk their lives every day on film sets, there isn’t much risk in “The Fall Guy.”
Leitch cares too much about winning over the audience. He doesn’t trust himself to make strong choices that may alienate some viewers. So he plays it safe, relying heavily on action and romance movie tropes while acknowledging how cliched and expected they are so the audience knows that he knows that they know what he’s doing. This has been his MO for some time, and it gets more aggravating every time I see it. Not only has that brand of metacommentary been completely overplayed, it’s riffing off boring tropes from boring movies. If you try to break cinema into its basic elements, comment on form or make an observation nobody else has before. When you seem embarrassed by your own choices, it takes away from your film’s otherwise earnest charms.
“The Fall Guy” can’t even be saved by two likable performances from its main stars, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Likable as they are, their characters are paper-thin. Neither actor has a movie star persona familiar enough to the audience to add depth just by their presence like the old stars could. Gosling and Blunt squeeze as much pleasure as possible from this awful script, but it’s not enough. You’re left with generic action set pieces, jokes that fall flat, and a film that simultaneously tries to give the audience what it wants but is ashamed to do so. It epitomizes why even “original” Hollywood filmmaking is in such a rut.
