Fall guy fall down, go boom
dir: David Leitch
2024
If you’ve ever read any of my reviews, you would occasionally see me ask the question “who is this for” or “what is the intended audience for this flick?” Sometimes it’s rhetorical, because I can’t figure it out. Other times I’m making the statement to shame the filmmakers for pandering to a particular imagined section of society.
And if you haven’t read any of my reviews, you wouldn’t have noticed that, and you’re not reading this now, or ever, so, yes, I am talking to myself again.
Other times I ask myself the question while watching a film, and then I figure it out as a painful realisation dawns upon me.
Why you would be using fifty year old KISS songs on a soundtrack, why you would have multiple references to the Miami Vice tv show, why you would even resurrect a tv show from the 80s that this arises from, that starred Lee Majors, why you would then have visual and auditory call backs to The Six Million Dollar Man, which also starred Majors, why you would even be talking about the mechanics of filmmaking and the logistics of stuntwork, and then have an abundance of other references to the ancient times of yore?
And then it hit me, and I felt a deep, deep shame. The audience, imagined or otherwise, was me, specifically me, and other fat movie nerds of my exact vintage.
Much younger people than I, like, my kid’s age, don’t care about movies and don’t know, or get, any references earlier than the late 2000s. People older than me routinely yell “EH?” and cup their hand over one of their ears because they didn’t quite hear what you just said, or they didn’t understand most of the words you used in a sentence. You would say “it was a tv show in the 80s with Lee Majors”, and then they’d think you were talking about Lee Marvin, and start talking about how great he was in Cat Ballou and what a lovely singing voice he had in Paint Your Wagon.
I, too, was born under a wandering star. But that’s immaterial right now. Right now I should be praising the virtues of Emily Blunt and the easy charm of Ryan Gosling, and their chemistry together, and the bravura action set pieces, and the twisty plot, and the delights of seeing something mostly filmed in Australia, and a lot of it in Sydney, as well.
And Hannah Waddingham, so great in everything else she’s in, like Ted Lasso and… whatever else she’s been in, surely she’s great here too?
This is simultaneously dense and somehow completely hollow, and nowhere near as charming and effortless as it thinks it is. I had pretty much the same feeling watching this as I did watching Bullet Train, which is not coincidentally the same director’s previous flick. Individual moments might have had a certain panache to them, but overall, despite the comedic setups, it really never clicked into place for me. I suspect if I watched it again, with perhaps some beers in me, or a nice prosecco, its charms would be more self-evident. But I don’t have time for that right now. There are so many other movies to see. So, so many. It never ends.
As a tribute to the hard working men and women who make the stars look good by being their stunt doubles, I dunno, this never really seemed like that much of a tribute to them. It acknowledges that they work hard and pay the price for other people’s egos, and that CGI is weightless and robs scenes of a visceral thrill a lot of the time, but then it has a stack of CGI anyway and as well as the “practical” stunt scenes.
The stunt scenes are okay, pretty good sometimes, but mostly okay. It’s funny to me that they don’t even come close, stuntwise, to the kinds of stunts people like Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Bridgette Lin, Sammo Hung or Michelle Yeoh were doing forty years ago at their peak or even in their decline were capable of, though admittedly they routinely used to nearly kill people just for the perfect shots.
The real villain in this flick is Tom Cruise, and he never even appears, but I’m pretty sure it’s him. The villain in this isn’t Hollywood, or the film industry, it’s the ego of one little man, which results in many deaths. His ego demands that he bellows to the world “I DO ALL MY OWN STUNTS”, yet everyone working with him, especially his stunt double, knows that’s not true.
But when one stunt double mocks him, he’s killed for it, and the villains use digital effects, CGI, to frame our hero Colt Seavers (Gosling), which sounds like a name only an American could have.
When Ryan Gosling isn’t too busy saving jazz, he’s become the new poster boy for non-threatening beefcake masculinity that isn’t afraid to cry while listening to Tay-Tay and thinking about what went wrong in his last relationship. But it can also punch baddies in the face and take a hell of a lot of abuse.
I’m not going to talk about the plot at all, because it’s pointless and stupid. What the whole flick seems to coast on is that Colt and Jody (Blunt’s character) are star-crossed lovers, and that when he had an accident that broke his fucking back, and they didn’t communicate for months, her feelings were hurt, and he was trapped in a shame spiral so that –
Fuck, that’s dumb and lame. It’s so contrived, that they lean into the contrivance and tell us, in the audience, that they know it’s contrived, and then they bludgeon us to death with references to “the third act problems”, as in, how they’re going to end the movie, as in with a happy ending or a sad ending where they don’t get together, Sydney is entirely destroyed (yay!), and Gosling and his sculpted Ken-doll like physique ride off into the sunset on a motorbike, probably.
It’s too much, and that really didn’t work for me. I’m already watching a movie. I know I’m watching a movie. I don’t need you to tell me you’re aware that I know that I’m watching a movie. Just tell me your story, and then let me go home. That’s it. Meta for meta’s own sake has been done to fucking death already.
Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling can do chummy roles like this in their sleep, but there’s never any sense that they should be together as a couple on screen. They give off great friends energy. I’m sure their kids have fun playing together, and having barbecues together in probably the Bahamas or the Maldives or wherever these rich fucks have their family getaways.
It’s just, really, however artificial it all is, we’re meant to believe in the fantasy, not just be brought along, in on the joke, so to speak.
If he’s funny in this, and he probably is, it’s nowhere near as funny as he was in Barbie as Ken, and he had just as much chemistry with Barbie as he does with Jody, which is nil. But at least in Barbie it was because they are talking plastic dolls with no genitalia, even if he assures us that he has all the genitals possible.
It’s also good to see Winston Duke playing some friend character for Colt, as a fellow stuntman, and he gets some good scenes.
There were a fair few times, like every time an Australian actor spoke, that I felt a fair amount of cringe deep in my soul. It reminded me that Americans don’t really think Australians exist, and that if we do, we are a strange and incomprehensible lot. I wonder if the director, or more likely, one of the director’s assistant’s interns yelled at the Aussie extras or ones in minor roles “Sound more Aussie ya mungrels!”
Flaming heck ya pack of galahs! And stone the crows while you’re at it. This flick was okay. It’s not bad, not actively bad, but it’s not the thrill ride it thinks it is.
And the terrible film within the film being made, Metalstorm? That looked at least marginally better than the last Zack Snyder movies made for Netflix, so that’s something at least.
There’s a tribute during the credits to ‘great’ stunt work and such, and that looked great, so great that I wondered why that wasn’t in the movie itself.
The Fall Guy. It’s okay.
6 times I was amazed to see that Lee Majors is still alive out of 10
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“I'm just a boy in a neon suit, standing in front of a girl, reminding her that Notting Hill is her favourite movie. And she watches Love Actually every year at Christmas.” – enough with the references, already - The Fall Guy
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