Jonah Naplan   May 3, 2024

I wanted to love “The Fall Guy” with every ounce of my being, but the movie just…wouldn’t let me. A slapdash extravaganza of one convoluted idea after the next, the center of this film is undeniably sincere and clearly holds a special place in the heart of director David Leitch (“Bullet Train,” “Deadpool 2,” “Atomic Blonde”), who, prior to becoming a filmmaker, worked as a stuntman for big movie stars, and has now written a love letter to that often overlooked performance art (stuntmen and women don’t even have their own category at the Oscars!). His movie is also about the love of making movies, and has the distinct, retro vibe of something released thirty years ago when blockbusters didn’t value content as much as they did big movie stars who could put butts in seats. The problem is that all this thematic potential ultimately amounts to nothing, drawing out its themes to the point where “The Fall Guy” just feels dull and not even competent enough to pass a good two hours. I kept trying to love it. But I just couldn’t. It’s the biggest disappointment of 2024 so far.

The movie follows Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), the stuntman for popular Hollywood actor Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose life and relationship with his girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt) gets turned upside down when a horrible fall completely redefines his life. Eighteen months later, Colt is trying to reconnect with the world, and finally gets his shot when Jody’s producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) coaxes him back into the spotlight with the prospect of Jody’s directorial debut. Having taken the job, Colt begins to rekindle lost love with Jody in a sort of awkward rom-com mishmash scenario that never lands in a particularly memorable way, despite both Gosling and Blunt selling the heck out of their quirky romance. These two talented performers are undeniably the best part of this entire picture, unloading endless charisma like the true movie stars they are. But even so, there’s really only so much they can do to uphold such a lousy script packed with so many messy plots and incoherent ideas that wants to throw everything it’s got at the audience just to see what sticks.

The narrative complicates itself by adding a mystery throughline regarding the disappearance of Ryder, and Colt’s treacherous duty to bring him back to the set of Jody’s movie called “Metalstorm.” By one point or another, armed men with guns, AI deep fakes, and a dastardly scheme all work their way into this narrative, heightening the stakes by superficial rather than organic means. Everything about “The Fall Guy” has a sort of hyper-manufactured, simulacral shine to it, woefully unnatural and distracting. The disconnect between character and viewer took me out of the movie several times and it’s evidence of an undercooked script by Drew Pearce that seems to want to capture our attention through flashy visuals rather than character beats or important themes. Fun side performances from Winston Duke, Stephanie Hsu, and Teresa Palmer all get underutilized by that same token. It’s ironic that a movie prone to criticize and poke fun at the tropes of modern blockbusters still falls subject to so many of the worst ones; thin characters, a treasure trove of convenient plot twists, and a nonsensical finale where a lot of things go boom and little care is given to anything other than the cinematic spectacle.

Sure, it’s all in good fun, you could argue, and yes, that’s what I was hoping “The Fall Guy” would be like, but its best and most inventive moments—such as a fight in a dumpster being rolled across the street, and a couple of smart moments of hand-to-hand combat—never entirely work because there’s something about it all that feels strangely artificial. Whether you find yourself entertained by this movie will be the real point of debate here, as has been the case with all of the “Fast and the Furious” movies, the Warner Bros. “Monsterverse,” any Guy Ritchie film, Jason Statham, Liam Neeson or Tom Cruise action vehicle, elevated thrillers like “M3GAN” or “Cocaine Bear,” and even “Argylle” from three months ago. I found much of this film to be a bore, and it brings me absolutely no joy to report that. “The Fall Guy” is one of the only movies in recent memory where I’ve been so incredibly pumped by the trailers, critics have praised it as great, and then when I actually went to go see it…I didn’t like it.

I’m prepared to face all the discourse I’ll receive about this movie, ranging from the “Critics just don’t know how to have fun,” to the “Mr. Pretentious thinks everything has to be high art.” Though I’d argue those sentiments are not true for most working critics anyway, that’s besides the point. The point is that I tried so hard to love “The Fall Guy”—between forcing out chuckles at things that I didn’t actually find very funny, and desperately “locking into” the plot because my mind kept tuning out unexpectedly—but every time I thought to myself “Okay, now things are gonna start living up to the hype,” the movie took an awkward left turn and lost my interest.

There’s lots of potential roots to this issue. The first is that the plot is so self-serious that all its contrivances get completely overlooked in the name of a consistent cinematic language designed to overwhelm the senses. It just underwhelmed me mostly. The second is that the film abandons the central elevator pitch of making a big Hollywood movie inside a big Hollywood movie pretty quickly, and “The Fall Guy” just turns into any old summer blockbuster without the intellectual spirit of the most memorable ones. The third is that while Gosling and Blunt are brilliant performers, their characters are written in such a way that they’re never allowed to ascend beyond the traditional clichés of male and female roles in movies like this. The fact that “The Fall Guy” is a blockbuster about the production of a blockbuster doesn’t disguise the fact that it’s still just a blockbuster.

But is it entertaining enough to watch on a date night, at home on the couch with a glass of wine, or, at the very least, on an airplane? Your mileage will most certainly vary. Something about the clunky pacing of this movie made me check out within the first fifteen to twenty minutes and struggle for air throughout the remainder of the runtime, but if you can manage to ride its wavelength you’ll probably have an uninhibited blast. Every praise of this film has lingered on the idea that “The Fall Guy” successfully defies the modern blockbuster expectation by focusing on campy fun rather than furthering pre-existing plotlines in order to establish the context for future franchise entries. And while I’m grateful that it is a stand alone movie and therefore doesn’t need to service any lore or hold the hand of posterity, it gets so infatuated with the idea of being a cinematic “revival picture,” that it pushes itself too far into the category of originality and blatantly tells us that it’s something new and interesting instead of the audience coming by that realization organically.

What a shame. “The Fall Guy” could have actually become something of a new classic like the movie it thinks it is. And the most depressing part of all is that it’s not even so bad that I can bring myself to truly resent it. I left feeling empty and unfulfilled because I felt like I had just consumed a movie of zero substance, neither good nor bad. It’s hard to shake the feeling that that’s even worse.

Now playing in theaters.