'Fall Guy' doubles down on action

 

   

     Love is in the air and so are many flying bodies in The Fall Guy, an action/romcom in which Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt generate plenty of chemistry. 

   Fresh from his Barbie turn as Ken, Gosling brings shabby appeal to his role as a top stunt man going through a rough time. Blunt responds as an ambitious movie director who can control a set but can't entirely manage her emotions.

   Romance aside -- and, in this outing, it too often falls from view -- The Fall Guy comes across like prep work for summer at the movies, a time when mayhem tends to turn plots into burdensome afterthoughts.

     I had hopes, though. The Fall Guy might have been an engaging look at the lives of stunt men, those stalwarts who create heart-stopping effects that rely on human effort rather than CGI manipulation. 

   Instead, the movie comes across as an over-amped serving of action. Its most arresting footage can be seen in the clips that accompany the end credits, snippets that reveal as much about moviemaking as the movie itself.

  The Fall Guy gets off to a good start with Gosling playing Colt Seavers, a respected stuntman who’s asked to repeat a stunt involving a dizzying fall. 

 Colt works as the stunt double for Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a high-profile action star whose ego has expanded along with the box office receipts he generates. Because he thought too much of Colt's face could be seen during the first attempt, Ryder demands a do-over.

   The second fall goes badly. Colt breaks his back. His pride and body wounded, he retreats into solitude that destroys his relationship with Blunt’s Jody Moreno, who at the time was a camera operator.

   Eighteen months pass and Colt, now working as a valet, is asked to travel to Australia to do stunts in  Jody's Metalstorm. She's making her directorial debut with an action-packed picture populated by aliens and the space cowboy who fights them. 

  But wait. The film’s producer (Hannah  Waddingham of Apple's Ted Lasso) summoned Colt without Jody’s approval. Jody's still brooding about how Colt gave up on their relationship.

    And so it begins. What, you ask? 

    A cluttered story that swamps the relationship between Colt and Jody in favor of stunts that spill over into the movie's "real-life" plot, which surfaces when Colt is asked to find Ryder. The moody star has disappeared.

    A former stunt man who directed Brad Pitt in Bullet Train and who has served as Pitt's stunt double, director David Leitch provides a bit of welcome information for movie fans.

    Leitch clues us in about cannon rolls, stunts in which cars are flipped. He breaks the rules by showing us, as the saying goes, how the sausage is made when Colt is flung against a rock after being set on fire. Wires yank other folks out of scenes, and we see the exhilaration generated by the timing and teamwork that accompanies the success of a complicated stunt.

   But, oh, that convoluted storyline. 

    I half wondered whether the movie that Jody films might have been more fun than the mystery the film revolves around; i.e., what’s really behind Ryder’s disappearance? 

   Leitch sets up the action in ways that are supposed to be funny; sometimes they are; sometimes they aren't — at least that’s how I saw it. I thought Leitch did a better job in Bullet Train.

     The Fall Guy delivers action while trying (vainly, I think) to poke fun at Hollywood’s obsession with stunt-and-grunt moviemaking.

    The result: a noisy, sometimes battering mashup of romance and action that shortchanges the former to serve the latter. For all its stunts, flash, and glamor, The Fall Guy feels undernourished, a blaring helping of commotion sans much of anything resembling sustenance.