Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt Are the Best Part of 'The Fall Guy'
The supposedly great movie that no one saw comes to VOD this week. We answer the question: but is it any good?
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If you follow entertainment journalism, one of the biggest stories of the past month was the relative failure of The Fall Guy. It was a big, fun action film starring two of the biggest stars in Hollywood — Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt — and both critics and audiences seemed to love it. And yet it grossed just (“just”) $129 million worldwide on a $125-$140 million budget (nowhere near profitable once you factor in advertising and promo). This was a fact bemoaned from many corners, and Universal basically caved, putting the film out on VOD just two weeks after its theatrical release, way ahead of the old, previously sacrosanct theatrical window.
As a dedicated “movie guy,” I thought I’d do my part for the health of the industry and see this thing on the big screen even though I could just as easily wait a couple of days and watch it at home. I still love the theatrical experience. Even in spite of the moronic patrons who talk through the movies, the deprofessionalized skeleton crew running most theaters now who don’t know anything about proper projection or sound anymore, and the lack of rewind and subtitles options, it remains one of the few places I can reliably stop checking my phone and just turn off for a few hours. If you ever have the ability to check out an empty screening in the middle of the day, I highly recommend it.
Okay, so The Fall Guy. It was written by Drew Pearce, previously of Hobbs & Shaw and Iron Man 3 (the best Iron Man) and directed by David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2) and for about 20 minutes, I thought they’d cracked the code. Mostly that code involved “put Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in a movie together,” but still. The lines were landing, the needle drops were solidly down the middle (is there a better audience pumper upper than “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC), and it felt close to perfection.
We like to elevate and intellectualize actors’ performances, but sometimes the simplest, most obvious old school movie exec’s explanation for the ones that work is the most correct: movie stars are people who you just can’t help but fall in love with a little. Gosling plays a more sympathetic riff on his Barbie character, a sort of himbo with a heart of gold named Colt Seavers, who works as a stuntman. We meet him in the first stages of flirtation with his camera operator crush, Jody, played by Emily Blunt, with whom he discusses lunch plans and spicy margaritas in between falling in mud puddles and getting thrown into walls. Perfect set up.
It’s hard to pinpoint the precise mix of inner steel, guarded vulnerability, pursed upper lip and soulful eyes makes Emily Blunt so appealing, but God what a dream she is. If you haven’t seen The English go and binge that right now. She pulls off “relatable-yet-irresistible heroine” like no one on Earth, and watching her fall in love with Baby Goose’s human golden retriever while he gets shot out of cannons and thrown off buildings like Wile E. Coyote is more thrilling than any car chase or explosion. (Gosling basically played Wile E. Coyote in The Nice Guys, which makes his character in The Fall Guy something like Barbie meets The Nice Guys).
Then there’s an Event, and the two become Estranged, until the moment when a producer played by Hannah Waddingham (another wonderful actor, perfectly cast) calls up Colt to tell him he’s needed. Something has happened to the star on the set of Jody’s directorial debut, and Jody has requested Colt, specifically. That star is Tom Ryder, a himbo without a heart of gold played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, one of the few actors handsome enough to make the idea of Ryan Gosling being his stunt double at least infinitesimally plausible. ATJ is about as perfectly cast as everyone else here, and at one point during a pivotal scene does a pitch-perfect impression of Matthew McConaughey (that no one in the movie acknowledges it as such is what makes it so great as a reference).
Did they do it? Did they make the perfect summer movie? And why isn’t anyone seeing it?
I know they’re considered box office poison and everyone hates them (pretends to?), but I am an absolute sucker for a movie about making movies. La La Land? Yes. Babylon? Absolutely. Singing In The Rain? Doy. Give me The Artist five times a week and Hail Caesar twice on Sunday, Mank you very much. They say write what you know, and the only thing folks in the entertainment industry like more than talking about themselves is gossiping about their friends. The Fall Guy is “a love letter to stunt performers” directed by a former stunt performer (Leitch and Gosling actually showed up before the opening credits to tell us this in a pre-roll intro), which gives it an obvious personal touch.
And yet at a certain point, and maybe predictably so, a movie that proved Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt falling in love could be more exciting than any action set piece devolves into a series of action set pieces. Colt Seavers shows up to the set of Jody’s new movie shooting in Sydney and quickly gets drawn into a hare-brained life-and-death mystery straight out of one of his movies.
The riff on La La Land I thought I had been watching turned out to be more like Scream, which is to say less a movie about making art and more an extended genre exercise packed full of movie references. Seavers’ best pal, Dan Tucker, played by Winston Duke (yet another wonderfully cast actor whose competence as a performer is matched only by his personal charm) drives this point home by constantly doing movie lines at him. Rocky, The Matrix, Last of the Mohicans — Dan can quote them all, and does, and it’s a credit to Duke that he manages to make this actually mildly charming and not the existential horror that was Regal Cinemas’ “movie quotes” pre-roll (an experience so nightmarish they finally discontinued it five or six months ago).
Wanting Inside Llewyn Davis and getting Knight and Day is maybe on me, but the narrative justification for many of The Fall Guy’s biggest stunts is just a little lacking. And if you’re making a movie about the real guys behind the movie stunts we see, packing it full of stunts done just for the sake of doing stunts rather than the story kind of undercuts the entire premise.