The Fall Guy, like so many modern blockbusters, is really, really frustrating.
The movie, which follows stuntman Colt (Ryan Gosling) as he makes his return to movies to work for his ex-girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt) on her first film production, is the sort of thing that is always going to tempt me – a little meta-comedy with some over-the-top action thrown in, all against the comedy-rich backdrop of Hollywood moviemaking.
There is good in The Fall Guy (despite the fact it’s directed by David Leitch, the man behind one of the most singularly turgid and dreadful movies of the last ten years), and that’s perhaps what makes it such a frustrating watch. The premise alone is really fun, and one that serves Gosling well at this point in his career – he’s a sort of post-ironic heartthrob after his rightfully-iconic turn as Ken, and somehow, it suits him down to the ground. He’s generally an enormously fun presence in this movie (aside from the romance plot, but we’ll get there), especially when he gets to bounce off the outstanding Hannah Waddingham or Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
These two, the undeniable highlights of the movie, are both playing deliciously over-the-top Hollywood villains, and the film’s biggest laughs come from the skewering of the luvvie nonsense that populates an industry straddling art and product so uncomfortably. There’s some decent action here too, especially the third-act chaos that genuinely serves as the high point of the whole movie – rare for a modern blockbuster to go out on a high, in this era of third act monologues on third act monologues, but it pulls it off.
But, as a whole, the movie just reads as so unpolished to me. Yes, there’s some cool action – but it’s edited and chopped-up with other scenes that break the tension and leaves the pace trailing. The script frequently stinks of a first draft, dialogue clunking on top of itself in a great big ugly mess – things that could and should have been seeded earlier in the movie are tossed in as an obvious last-minute plothole fix, giving the story the feel of a collection of parts piled precariously on top of one another rather than interlocking pieces that come together to form a whole.
And then, of course, there’s the central romance plot. Look, I’ve written before about why I think so much romance writing in the mainstream is so shitty, but this, I think, defies even those kind of explanations. It seems as though Gosling and Blunt were mostly just left to ad-lib at each other after reading from a collection of Millennial Humour Flash Cards – it reads, tragically, much like the iconically-dreadful The Amazing Spider-Man romance between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, an awkward, uninspired mess that annihilates what chemistry these two very solid actors should have been able to bring to these roles. I’ve truly never seen Emily Blunt as bad as she is here, and I really think that’s down to the script (or complete lack of it) utterly failing to capture an even passably convincing love story between these two. That wouldn’t be such a huge problem in another movie, but here, selling this romance is the engine of the entire plot – and, when that engine is sputtering and backfiring at every turn, maybe it’s time for a rewrite.
The Fall Guy is frustrating because, like so many other blockbusters in recent memory, of how many of the issues on display here could have been fixed with a second round of script edits, a tighter eye for momentum in the action scenes, and time spent building a stronger relationship between the two leads. In a film with this kind of budget and production clout behind it, these sloppy problems just shouldn’t be getting through into the final cut – but, as it stands, they did, and what we’re left with is a flabby, disappointing mess as a result.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Empire)
No But Listen 