A Pretty Decent Way To Start The Summer

Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review, Universal | Tagged: The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy isn’t going to change anyone’s life, but it’s a pretty good time at the movies and exactly what everyone wants to kick off the summer holidays with.

The Fall Guy is a pretty good time even if it fails to be as spectacular as the stunts tease it could have been with some script rewrites.

Director: David Leitch
Summary: A down-and-out stuntman must find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend’s blockbuster film.

The summer blockbuster season is when studios show up with some of the year’s biggest movies as they try to grab family audiences and kids who are out of school. The season usually starts in May and will go until the end of August, with different times in that period being “better” than others. Some studios are betting most of the year on how well their summer blockbuster does, so there isn’t much room for error. Last year, the box office wasn’t very kind to decidedly mediocre movies. As we head into this weekend and The Fall Guy, a pretty good film but nothing special, it will be telling to see how this summer decides to treat mediocre films.

The Fall Guy, closely based on the television series of the same name, is basically a love letter to stunt performers and the art of moviemaking itself. The marketing campaign has been focusing on the behind-the-scenes a lot and making sure that we know as much about the people doing the thankless tasks as we do about the movie stars. That aspect of the film, watching how Colt (Ryan Gosling) and the rest of the team on film work together and the dynamic we see, is probably the best part of the entire story.

Gosling remains one of the more underutilized actors in Hollywood, as people weren’t quite sure what to do with him. His fellow Ryan [Reynolds] was in a similar boat in that they are both classically handsome, so putting them in leading roles focusing on their looks seemed to be the go-to. However, Gosling has proven that he can handle various roles, from the blank effect of the driver in Drive to channeling all of the Kenery in Barbie. The Fall Guy feels like an excellent way to use Gosling and his style of comedy, which, because this is a movie about stunts, is very physical.

Gosling seems like someone who probably has charisma with a paper plate. Still, the romantic element between his character and Jody (Emily Blunt) was perhaps the least believable part of the entire film. They are very believable as friends, but there is something lacking about the romance. The least interesting part of the whole film was when Colt tried to “win” Jody back by saving the movie she was trying to direct. The script didn’t do a good enough job, wanting us, the audience, to see Jody succeed as a director rather than see her and Colt get back together. We should have been more invested in her career and not this romance.

The supporting cast fares the best out of everyone, with Hannah Waddingham playing a producer who is So Very Done with the movie star she is following from project to project, Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Taylor-Johnson isn’t actually given much to do even with the high billing that he is given, but he’s utterly insufferably in the way you know someone on a set in Hollywood is. Winston Duke absolutely shines as one of the other stunt coordinators on Jody’s film, while we get a brief but awesome moment with Stephanie Hsu as a PA who deserves better than this. All of the supporting players add dimension to everything happening around the flat romance that drags down the rest of the film.

The rest of the film is the story and pacing. It’s the first film of the summer, and we are already settling into the “did this need to be over two hours” camp. So many movies last year were kneecapped because they were too damn long, and The Fall Guy isn’t quite at the “too damn long” level of bad, but it’s too long and should have been twenty minutes shorter. The second act, in particular, really drags and feels like it goes on forever. Even while we watch Colt try to solve a “mystery,” it still feels too long. The third act and the final action scene are massive, and instead of feeling epic, it was almost grueling because the weight of that insanely long and drawn-out second act really dragged everything down.

The question of the action scenes will come up, and they look fantastic. Director David Leitch started in the industry, so he knows all about what these people go through and how to make all of it look good on screen. We have a film where we are watching stunt performers do the stunts in the in-universe film. Then you have to take that and make it look good and realistic as well. It’s a directing double act, and Leitch is doing a very good job of making it all look pretty seamless. That part of the film is excellent, and even in the credits, the movie makes sure we all know that the stunt performers are the only reason this film is being made.

The Fall Guy isn’t going to change anyone’s life, but it’s a pretty good time at the movies and exactly what everyone wants to kick off the summer holidays with. It’s a good time in a movie theater because massive stunts and action scenes like this should be seen on a big screen. It’s a love letter to all things movie, so of course, a massive screen in a theater is the way to go.

However, it’s a crowded month for major movies in theaters; with so many more movies opening up in May with so much potential, what is your movie budget? How important are films like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Furiosa, or IF to you if you can only see so many movies in a month? That is a personal thing you’ll have to decide, but it’s a pretty good time for those who choose to take the chance on The Fall Guy, even if it misses the mark.

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