**/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham
written by Drew Pearce
directed by David Leitch
by Walter Chaw I watched David Leitch’s The Fall Guy the same way I try to spot a particularly well-camouflaged insect in a terrarium: with a little disgust, a little fascination, a little fear of the uncanny. You know when you know something’s there but you can’t see it? Could be the terrarium keepers are playing a trick, though, right? Could be there’s just a stick in there. By all accounts, real people made and executed The Fall Guy, but who can tell these days without some kind of Voight-Kampff detector? The film is ostensibly based on the classic five-season run of a Lee Majors television show I watched religiously as a kid, though I only retained the theme song (“Unknown Stuntman,” performed by Majors himself), so naturally, I rewatched the entire first season of it to rekindle my crush on Heather Thomas and confirm there’s no real connection between it and the film. The movie does seem to share some elements with Richard Rush’s cult classic The Stunt Man (1980), but it eschews the naked paranoia and strident social commentary. It shares some cosmetic elements with Robert Mandel’s F/X (1986) and its underestimated sequel (F/X 2 (1991)), too. Ultimately, the best analogue in terms of how weird it feels is John McTiernan’s meta-movie Last Action Hero (1993), only without the relative cleverness of a concept higher than “stuntmen do stunts.”
What I’m grasping to articulate is how The Fall Guy exists entirely within the Uncanny Valley. It’s a movie about people working a hugely physical sleight-of-hand that stars a person who, in this enterprise, is bolstered by a team of highly-paid, drilled illusionists. It’s a double-, maybe even a triple-blind–not unlike the “Llorando” sequence from Mulholland Dr.–in which you’re told that nothing is real within the movie and you come to understand the film itself is unreal: an artifact whose construction is specifically designed to call out its own unreliability. What this means for the viewer is that our engagement with it is held hostage to the knowledge that any investment will be betrayed. We are Charlie Brown, and The Fall Guy is the football. While the football indisputably holds a fascination for Charlie Brown, I don’t think he likes Lucy constantly yanking it out from under him. Or maybe he does. Maybe Charlie Brown is into the humiliation. The Fall Guy only works if you somehow can’t figure out that Lucy will never let you kick the football, or if you like it when she doesn’t. In either case, the football looks real–but as far as you’re concerned, it’s a manifest figment of your frustrated desires.
That stuntman is Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), the trusty stunt double for Tom Cruise manqué Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)–who, unlike Cruise, doesn’t do his own stunts. Colt’s in love with DP Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), but when he breaks his back in a terrible on-set accident, he finds himself unnerved and emasculated and goes off the grid during his long convalescence. Flash forward a few years, and Jody is getting her shot at directing a mega-million-dollar studio tentpole blockbuster (a stark reminder that this is on some level a work of fantasy) for sharklike producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham). It’s her big break and, lo, she asks for Colt by name to double for Tom Ryder. This is his chance to tell her all the feelings and regrets he’s been nursing in his humiliating new job as a valet. But wait! It’s all a trick! To frame Colt for murder! Or maybe it’s a drug thing! Jody really loves Colt, however, and Colt really loves Jody. We know this because of a protracted scene played out over bullhorns where they talk about it in the middle of the film-within-a-film’s giant desert battlefield, where aliens are trying to kill a space cowboy they keep setting on fire. The running gag of The Fall Guy is how much bodily punishment Colt absorbs. He’s defenestrated a few dozen times, immolated, barrel-rolled, exploded, shot at, stabbed, punched (it goes without saying), dragged behind various things, and dropped from assorted heights. He gets into a fight at a nightclub while wearing a glow-in-the-dark DayGlo suit and then sits in his car and cries about the one who got away. (Jody.) I guess what the movie is about is whether or not they’ll get back together? I mean, I don’t think I ever thought he might die or something…
What The Fall Guy seems to be is a compendium of self-referential metatextual moments that would be meaningless for anyone younger than me (like the “Six Million Dollar Man” bionic noise that functions as a callback to a different Lee Majors TV series) and/or irritating for everyone (like when Colt, brainstorming with Jody, suggests a split-screen effect, which the film immediately applies in the most ingratiating, hardy-har fashion possible). The small-screen theme song, recreated here by Blake Shelton, contains lyrics about how the “unknown stuntman” never gets the girl, yet the film it decorates is pretty much only about stuntman Colt getting the girl. (The show itself was about a stuntman who made ends meet as a bounty hunter.) But here’s the song, anyway, connecting the film to an artifact it otherwise has nothing to do with. If Leitch’s The Fall Guy has a theme song, it’s Kiss‘ “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” which isn’t used as a period indicator–this isn’t a period piece–but rather as a random needle-drop crowd-pleaser prevalent now in the post-James Gunn era. Since there’s Kiss, could Journey be far behind? Indeed, they could not.
Although you could make the case that The Fall Guy is about the cult of masculinity, you’d be mistaken. You could defend it as a celebration of the stuntman’s art, but aren’t the Leitch-produced John Wick films already that, except good? If the real subtext of The Fall Guy is that Cruise might be a sociopathic murderer, tell me something I don’t know, amiright? The real question to ask is whether you’re denigrating the profession by making a jokey, slapstick cartoon out of what stunt people do–by suggesting that Colt is made out of rubber and never in serious mortal danger. (Consider the closing-credits reel showing the actual stunt people doing the stuff Colt is supposedly doing in the film and how not a one of them is smiling and laughing while defying death.) You could ask that, but then you wouldn’t sit back and enjoy all that slick, lubed-up, frictionless, expensive plastic-fantastic. I will say that Emily Blunt–an actor capable of anything, it seems–is wasted egregiously and should have played Colt in an echo of her role in Edge of Tomorrow, with Gosling as an ineffectual, nay, castrated director in an echo of his role in The Nice Guys. But imagining a better movie is what I do when I’m watching a bad one. I don’t know what I kept hoping to see here. Honestly, for all its poking around, The Fall Guy is probably just a stick.
