THE FALL GUY is big fun made better by crackerjack cast and its whimsical penchant for self-reference. Based on the vintage television series of the same name, it reboots Colt Seaver (Ryan Gosling) as a stuntman for the hottest star in Hollywood, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and madly in love with Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a camera operator who dreams of being a director, and expands the action with hellzapoppin stunts (duh) and a fiendish take on the film business that plays like a wary love letter to the biz. Not to mention the unsung heroes that take death-defying leaps, combust on demand, and do things with cars that no engineer could envision. You can tell that its director, Donovan Leitch, used to be one of the unsung.
Life is good for Colt and Jody as the story begins, but a near-fatal accident breaks Colt’s back and his spirit. Eighteen months later, he’s parking cars instead of rolling them, and maintaining radio silence with Jody despite her pleas to let her nurse him back to health. That’s when a call comes in from Tom’s oily and constantly hydrating producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddington, deliciously unhinged). Jody has finally gotten her big break as a director on a sci-fi action flick starring Tom, and she desperately needs Colt to do the complicated stunts she envisions. Hence Colt finds himself in Australia dealing with jet lag, the repercussions of massive misunderstandings, the difficulties in getting a cup of coffee down under, and a missing Tom Ryder. With production threatening to shut down and kill Jody’s dream forever, Colt agrees to use his very specific skill set to find Tom, finish the film, and thereby maybe win back the love of his life after ghosting her.
Irreverent as well as self-referential, the film clicks along reveling in callouts to classic movies in an unabashed love-fest for films of all genres. It takes us behind the scenes of just how all those breathtaking stunts are done and acknowledges in advance the problems with its third act so deftly that one might be forgiven for thinking those problems were part of the original plan. And a commentary on filmmaking. This is, after all, a slick piece of cinema that can take the idiom of a split screen and use it to annotate Colt and Jody’s relationship while still sending it up as a gimmick. It embraces cinematic tropes and adds a piquant twist. Tom Ryder (how can we not think Tom Cruise?) is an entitled self-serving child with an ego even bigger than his box-office, but he’s actually a great actor. One who boasts about doing his own stunts even though he had Colt written into his contracts for six years. As Rider, Taylor-Johnson is pitch perfect as the loathsome self-consciously preening star who is stunningly oblivious, even in matters of life and death.
As for Gosling and Blunt, they are a match made in celluloid heaven. It’s more than the sprightly banter given them by the writers, it’s the chemistry of two people who are consummate professionals but somehow still in high school when it comes to true love. And that’s part of the charm. We are living out the intensity of first love, only surrounded with pyrotechnics, PR machinations, and a screamingly funny sequence involving a drug dealer longing for a chat and a hallucinated unicorn.
The plot, suitably punctuated with a veritable cornucopia of eye-popping stunts, is full of wicked twists as it barrels along with a, ahem, punchy score into a hysteria of convolution. Never mind. The only thing that matters is that it is massively entertaining with nary a dull moment. There’s nary a moment that you aren’t rooting for these two to get back together, either, as they awkwardly navigate their palpable affection for one another that is almost as perilous as the cut-throat game that is show biz, or the synaptic effects engendered in one character by a low-carb diet.
THE FALL GUY has one of the best car-chases through a city even seen, adrenalin-inducing as well as funny and, in an oddball way, kinda sweet. This is a film that can be all three at once without breaking a sweat. Does it strain credulity? Sure. Do I care? Hell, no!
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