love + squalor

The Fall Guy is profoundly unserious. The stakes are: there are no stakes. The question of where it will land? Barely a question. You know damn near everything you need to know about what The Fall Guy is bringing to the table 30 seconds into the first teaser trailer, and that doesn’t matter. At all.

Look, here’s as much as you need to say about The Fall Guy: you’re a human. You eat food. Sometimes, maybe, you go to a Michelin-starred, multi-course, molecular gastronomie extravaganza and you get twists, turns, beauty, grace and all the little perversions of form you could ever desire to dazzle your senses. And sometimes – maybe even in the same night – all you want to do is pull up to the McDonald’s drive-thru, know exactly what it is your craving and receive precisely that scientifically-engineered cheeseburger with no alarms and no surprises. That McDonald’s sack of grease will be predictably fucking perfect, the platonic ideal of a slutty, quick and easy meal with absolutely no nutritional value, and The Fall Guy is 100% the movie equivalent of that double cheeseburger, large fry and chocolate milkshake (or McNuggets, whatever your thing is, I’m not here to yuck your yum). When you want McDonald’s, McDonald’s delivers exactly what it needs to be. Reliably. Satisfyingly. And we’re loving this. The Fall Guy? It, too, delivers on every single promise it makes.

Do I need to say more? No, not really, but I will, because just as I can pontificate on the way the McDonald’s french fry is a platonic ideal of food, I can absolutely tell you why The Fall Guy hits all the marks it needs to, doesn’t try to do anything beyond that, and why, frankly, that’s the best thing it could do. Because, look, this is a movie based on an 80s TV show (yeah, I didn’t know that until it started either) and designed to launch summer blockbuster season, and let’s be real: too many endeavors in both of these camps have – lately – gotten utterly trapped in self-serious, murky sludge.

Last year I didn’t bother with most of the movies marketing themselves as tentpole releases, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. Culturally, we seem to have hit the point of exhaustion with Marvel movies and the 2.5 hour run time it seems every other action movie has adopted to try to pack in a durational sense of more bang for your buck. The Fall Guy knows this, and replaces world building and CGI with intricately choreographed, goofy stuntwork, practical effects and raw, goofball charisma. It’s a movie star movie, and Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt understand the assignment implicitly.

As back-in-the-saddle stuntman Colt Seavers, Ryan Gosling is riding high off the energy of his turn in Barbie. Colt lost his job and what could be the love of his life after an on-set rig fails and sends him plummeting into a body cast and months of rehabilitation. After abandoning stuntwork for the glamorous life of valet parking, he’s brought back to set to fill in once again for megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a space opera he soon learns is the directorial debut of the Jody (Blunt) the girlfriend he’d embarrassingly lost touch with. The hurt is real, but the chemistry is still there, and after some crying in the car to Taylor Swift, one or two awkward encounters and a public excavation of Jody’s feelings around being ghosted when she could have been there to help him out, what’s looking like a good rekindling is sidelined by full-tilt chaos as Tom Ryder mysteriously disappears and Colt is pushed into a new role as amateur investigator.

You can guess how it all goes down, but that’s not the point. The point is this: Gosling has long been an actor with charm and comedic timing to spare (if you cared to look for it), and post-Ken, the monoculture has finally caught up to just what he has to offer beyond the brooding, silent characters that seemed to have almost driven him from the screen. Colt is another lovable himbo, and may mark the arrival of Gosling as the actual “movie star” he has long deserved to be.

It’s a magnetic performance that’s arguably far more difficult than it looks, and Gosling oscillates between pulling off intense action star and romantic comedy lead without, seemingly, breaking a sweat. He’s easy-going and suave enough to make the movie’s KISS theme song seem, you know, actually cool, and seems to have a natural chemistry with everything on the screen: woman, man, vehicle or dog. He needs to, because Colt’s journey through the film is one buoyed entirely by that watchability. We like watching how Colt reacts to the real life versions of the stunts he does on set just as much as we like watching how Colt and Jody trade quips and daydream of a beach day full of “spicy margs.”

It’s unfussy, uncomplicated and helped all the more by how much of a love affair with stuntwork the film is at heart. Colt is a character you root for in part because he stands in for something genuine (even in its artifice). Director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train, John Wick) is notably a former stuntworker who moved behind the camera, and The Fall Guy is in some ways a love letter to all the behind the scenes teams who – sometimes – take huge, life-threatening risks just to make magic happen, from beginning to end. As a film, all of this is approached with a compelling tenderness, so much so you might not even think to realize the ways the movie has walked you through actual death defying cannon rolls and jumps in ways which often both allow Colt to emerge as the real talent while also emphasizing – repeatedly – the way these feats have to be a calibrated, team effort built around real trust.

Of course, that may be where the true stakes of the film are located. Though I said before the stakes are that there are no stakes, that isn’t true for everything happening in the film’s stuntwork. What’s remarkable is the result of that can be a breezy, action-filled old Hollywood love story that appears as effortless as The Fall Guy. It’s just a fun movie, a straight-up good time. It wants to entertain you without trying to appease a bunch of nerds caught up on IP. And honestly? That’s enough.