The Fall Guy
A sweaty script can't save this rom-com's central relationship.
Summer action movies and rom-coms share the same core. Each genre is structured around the eventual triumph of its characters, enabling the audience to chase the exhilaration of physical or romantic prowess without needing to worry about logistics, failure, or real-world consequences. We go to these movies to see someone defy death or heartbreak and come up laughing and flashing a thumbs-up. The Fall Guy, directed by former stuntman David Leitch, seeks to combine action and romantic comedy into a single movie, structured around the physical feats of stunt work. All of Leitch’s movies are about stunt work to a certain extent, but The Fall Guy (written by Drew Pearce and Glen A. Larson) is the first to write his professional interests explicitly into the script.
Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a movie stuntman who lost his career and his girlfriend (a camera operator named Jodie, played by Emily Blunt) in an on-set accident. After a year or so of nursing both his wounds and his pride, he is pulled back into the world of moviemaking to help Jodie as she directs her debut feature film. The circumstances that bring him back to moviemaking don’t particularly matter, nor does much of the rest of the plot; The Fall Guy is powered by the same engine of miscommunication and complex coincidences that drive every other Hollywood blockbuster. The plot is an afterthought, a vehicle to deliver Colt either to his next stunt or to another encounter with Jodie, with little attention to the connective tissue between either.
The script isn’t interested in realistic portrayals of life on set as a stuntman. Like other movies that play fast and loose with reality, The Fall Guy is more interested in chasing down a feeling of excitement than it is with emotional verisimilitude. You need both for a believable actioner/rom-com; if the emotional stakes don’t feel real, then the excitement is empty. The film is more action-com than rom-com, repeatedly pushing its two romantic leads apart. The result is a film strangely detached from itself. On a meta level, the movie purports to be a love letter to the stuntpeople who make action scenes possible, but despite its lip service in praise of stunts, the film’s depiction of the particulars of a highly technical job is vague at best. It spends plenty of time talking about how great stunt work is and how great Colt and Jodie’s relationship was, but there’s nothing onscreen to convince the audience to root for Colt and Jodie to pull through. The action sequences, more often than not, are treated as mere punchlines.
This issue might be endemic to the medium. Hollywood likes to tell pretty lies about itself, showcasing the magic of moviemaking with none of the blood, sweat, or tears that went into making it. Hollywood movies would rather make something difficult look easy, all with a smile and an enthusiastic thumbs-up. In one sequence, Colt is repeatedly set on fire for a stunt. In between takes, we can see extras milling around amongst the cameras and lighting rigs, but the moment “action” is called, we switch to the “finished” version of the movie the characters are making. The aspect ratio changes, and the color grading goes metallic to reflect the space-cowboy atmosphere of their film. There isn’t much screen time given to the waiting periods in between bursts of excitement, nor the physical or psychological effort necessary to put one’s body on the line in order to create a striking image. Forget about post-production completely. For a movie about a highly technical part of the logistics of action moviemaking, The Fall Guy isn’t interested in the hard work that goes into the profession.
Nor is it interested in the effort it takes to patch up a failed relationship, despite all signaling to the contrary. Instead, the script gives Colt and Jodie increasingly burdensome lines about the particulars of the movie they’re making that map neatly on to the issues they’re trying to sort out in their own relationship. The resulting scenes are too cute by half, though Gosling and Blunt are both game players. Neither actor treats the source material with the same winking attitude that the script does. Both are excellent comedic performers with a superb sense of timing. And although the plot of the movie is rangy, the editing for individual scenes is tight, helped along by the patter of Gosling and Blunt’s tossed-off jokes and by their joint commitment to an emotional reality that the movie simply can’t match.
When Jodie sings a breakup song at a karaoke bar, we believe her only because Blunt commits more deeply than the script does. Gosling’s character, on the other hand, seems more fleshed out purely because we get to spend more screen time with him. We never get the chance to root for the central couple as a couple because the two keep being separated by circumstance, connected only by their chance encounters around set and their conversations about the movie they’re making. Jodie is a cipher, someone whom Colt used to know and wants to return to, but who has walled herself off from him. She keeps making artistic decisions as a director that The Fall Guy treats as opaque. The script isn’t interested in Jodie as a person, only as a love-interest trophy to be won at the end of the day. Most of the things we find compelling about her come from Blunt’s performance. She and Gosling make a cute couple, but the movie doesn’t manage to make them a good couple.
It’s a shame, because both performances are enjoyable enough almost to carry the movie, even though the script doesn’t manage to make their relationship believable. The Fall Guy is all budget and no brains, a weightless PG-13 action movie with no blood and a rom-com with no consequences. As a piece of entertainment, it’s enjoyable enough in the moment. Free-falling through a series of set pieces and jokes can be lighthearted fun. Too bad the point of the movie feels like such an afterthought.
★★☆☆
The Fall Guy is in theaters now.