Knee-jerk review: "The Fall Guy"

1. What a mess.
2. There's a couple of mildly amusing twists at the end (that we really should have seen coming), but overall we pretty much hated it.  Constantly rolling our eyes and checking our watch.  We thought it might never end.
3. And then the 12-year-old looked at us as the credits rolled - eyes sparkling - "That was really good."  We're such a grumpy ogre.
4. Pretty much every element of the movie felt misguided and/or inept.
5. What worked was Ryan Gosling's charm as he fumbled through the mystery plot.  The movie toyed with a "fish out of water" vibe as this kind of goofy Hollywood stunt man wandered into a pretty dark criminal underworld.  But the movie never really committed to it.  Instead, we kept having to go back to the romance subplot and the movie set where Emily Blunt was directing a big action movie.  That was a big problem because...
6. The scenes with Blunt were deadly, dragging everything to a dead stop.  We'd have never guessed she could be this dull and unlikable.  At times we were wondering why Gosling had any interest in her.  There's one especially awkward sequence where she cruelly tortures and humiliates him on the set in front of everyone just to get back at him for some pretty typical bad-boyfriend-type behavior.
7. It some ways The Fall Guy seemed to want to be a romantic comedy as these two estranged lovers figured out how to get back together.  But for that to work you need laughs.  All of those endlessly talky scenes with Gosling and Blunt were completely humorless.  Those moments played more like an overcooked Lifetime drama, totally out of whack with the screwball lunacy of the action scenes.
8. There's also a weird moment when Gosling shows he can fight, but it's completely undercut because he'd just been drugged by the bad guys and so the movie adds in this weird "I'm hallucinating!" animation stuff as it's happening so we weren't sure if he was really this good at fighting (it could have been funny if the stunt guy didn't know how to really fight) or if he was just imagining it.  This is a perfect example of how the movie likes to go for the fun gag at the expense of a clear and coherent story.
9. Like we said.  A mess. 
10. Then there's this painfully convoluted bit where the plot of the movie Blunt's making has parallels to what really happened with Blunt and Gosling's characters (did Blunt's character write the script?).  It doesn't work at all, but they keep going back to it and using the movie plot to work out their own romance. Clearly, the filmmakers think this element is very clever.  
11. All they really kept from the old 1980s TV show was the name Colt Seavers (which is pretty badass), his big pickup truck, his stunt man job, and the theme song.
12. We saw the negative reviews.  But we went anyway.  A lot of critics really don't like director David Leitch (who used to be a stunt man), but we thought 2017's Atomic Blonde and 2022's Bullet Train were a lot of fun.  The issue may be that he knows how to handle hard-boiled action (Atomic Blonde) and/or snarky action (Bullet Train) but is still figuring out more "realistic" romantic elements.
13. We don't want to get too inside baseball, but most of the Hollywood stuff felt completely phony and forced on multiple levels.  Most glaring: in the middle of a multi-million dollar action movie production, the director and the crew unwind with drinks at a karaoke bar?  It's not even dark outside when they go.  Another example: the swanky hotel suite where the lead actor is staying is full of props and posters from his past movies.  So he had all of that shipped to Australia for a three-month shoot?  Little things like that can make one go crazy.
14. Bonus points for the Lee Majors cameo at the end.  We didn't even recognize Heather Thomas in her cameo in the same scene.
15. It's hard to fathom that all of the talented filmmakers and seasoned studio executives saw how this movie was shaping up and didn't step in to fix it.  Or maybe this is the improved version of the original idea?
16. Avoid.

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