The Fall Guy

After a bad fall forces him out of the business, stuntman Colt Seavers is pulled back to the world of Hollywood Behind-The-Scenes Magic when the star of his ex-girlfriend’s first big studio movie suddenly disappears, and only Colt can find him. Soon enough, Colt finds himself ensnared in a sinister plot, where the only thing that can save him is… jumping a car over something.

I loved this show as a kid. Loved it.

It wasn’t good, not by any stretch of the imagination, but back in the day when only rich folks had cable, and we only had four TV channels to choose from, NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS, before Fox was even a channel, let alone the CW, any show that aired between 7 and 9 central standard time, where a guy was doing stuff, solving mysteries, fighting crime, and making time with the ladies, y’know… action man stuff, and all the while he had a signature vehicle while doing it…?

I was in.

The Dukes of Hazard, The A-Team, Knight Rider, Street Hawk, Starsky and Hutch, Chips, Magnum P.I., Automan… Any show where the climax of that week’s episode involved the signature vehicle in question jumping over one of the many ravines or gullys in the area, sometimes with the help of some kind of turbo boost, but usually just due to the grit, gumption, and the pure driving-skill joie de vivre of the main character, that shit was my jam.

But it wasn’t just about cars jumping over things for me. Like now, I was a bit of a renaissance man when it came to my TV tastes as a young child. I also enjoyed shows where the signature vehicle wasn’t a car or truck, shows like Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Riptide, or The Highwayman, shows where the signature vehicles were helicopters. In these shows, instead of jumping over stuff, the climax of the show would feature the signature vehicles hovering very close, and menacing the bad guys, and sometimes… they would use missiles that would blow up just behind cars full of bad guys, flipping the cars over, and then the bad guys would climb out of the wreckage very dazed and staggering about. Occasionally, usually at the end of the season, if the show had some money to burn in the budget, the missiles would blow up the dock area or warehouses where the bad guys were hanging out, and then we’d be treated to burly dudes in sports coats and turtlenecks diving away from explosions in slow motion.

Oh, yeah, you better believe that I loved those shows, and the Fall Guy was one of those shows. Every Wednesday night at 8pm Central and Mountain, I’d get my little Dukes of Hazard tv tray and some Red Baron pizza, and settle in for an hour’s worth of mystery, excitement, a few bikini girls, and a brown truck jumping over stuff.

In the TV show, Colt Seavers is a Hollywood stunt man who moonlights as a bounty hunter. Accompanied by his cousin Howie, a stuntman-in-training, and lady stuntman Jody, he uses his stuntman skills (especially when it comes to jumping his pickup over things) to capture fugitives and criminals.

So, when it comes to the movie version, it not only has brown trucks jumping over things, but helicopters meancing people, and stuff blowing up, so that’s all good.

BUT…

I will never not be mad that for some god damn unfathomable reason, this movie didn’t have a trailer that featured Ryan Gosling singing the Fall Guy theme song, with clips from the movie edited into a montage similar to the tv show’s opening credits. I just don’t understand how this didn’t happen. Especially after “I’m just Ken” from the Barbie movie was nomiated for an Oscar? Come on. That’s a no-brainer. Instead, they waste the theme song on the end credits like it was an afterthought, and it’s not even Gosling singing. What the hell, man? What the hell…

Fumbling easy lay-ups like that will never make sense to me.

Now, some folks out there might say that this kind of disconnect between expectations and intention is a good indication as to why this film is considered to be a failure. Others might say that a big part of why this film is considered to be a failure—and I hate to say that this is kind of true—is because it’s not very good. I think both are kind of true. I’ve seen the whole film, and it’s not very good, and has trouble deciding what kind of movie it wants to be. But at the same time, I don’t think that’s why this film is considered to be a failure, as this kind of stuff is not usually something that modern day audiences traditionally give a shit about.

Yes, this film is oddly paced, and most of its characters and their arcs are underwritten, or outright abandoned. It also has a main plot that doesn’t work at all, something that the film doesn’t seem to care about, mostly because it seems to have different priorites that also don’t seem to come to fruition. And on top of all of that, it’s capped off with a climax that, while spectacular, is still nonsensical from every possible angle.

It’s just… not that good.

But it’s not like The Fall Guy is the first big budget Hollywood film to have those problems. None of that shit has ever stopped people from loving the hell out of the Avatar movies, or the Fast and the Furious films, or the Mission Impossible movies, or even the Transformers films, films which, while at times spectacular, are mostly just garbge. Honestly, I think, if most people were to watch this movie, they’d enjoy it and not have any problem with it at all.

So, the Fall Guy’s failure is an interesting question.

I’m not sure why this film didn’t hit, as it really does have all the earmarks of a crowd pleaser, but the fact remains, it just didn’t hit. The only reason I can think of, is that it caught a bad wave. For whatever reason, audiences decided before it was released that they simply weren’t interested. I think it was mostly due to the advertising, personally, which, much like the film itself, seemed confused about what tone it wanted to strike. Whatever it was, because of this early reaction, this perceived stumble right out of the gate, and despite the fact that the film seems to have some legs, and is actually doing decent numbers both domestically, internationally, and on streaming, it will always be thought of in Hollywood now, and most importantly by the idiot Studio Execs, as a big failure. Weird how that happens to films sometimes.

I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

Anyway, all that’s just academic, really. It doesn’t really matter, at least, not on our level. For me, I don’t know why I expected better from this film, but I did, so I found myself to be hugely disappointed.

Having very little to do with the show beyond the name and the central profession, something that I don’t think anyone but me and a handful of other weirdos could have possibly cared about, in the film, Colt is the double to a little weiner primadonna of a superstar action star named Tom Ryder. Tom is an insecure little baby-man who truly believes himself to be the bad ass action idol that millions see up on the silver screen, all while living in terror that people might see him as much less than that. Colt is fine with working with Tom though, because he gets to work with his girlfriend Jody, and they’re on the verge of getting serious. But when a stunt goes wrong, Colt is hurt and depressed, and he ghosts both Jody and the entire industry. He only comes back when Jody’s producer Gail begs him to help find the suddenly missing Tom Ryder, because if the studio finds out Tom is gone, it could tank the whole movie, and this film is Jody’s first ever shot at directing a big budget sci-fi actioneer.

If this movie goes down, so does her career.

After that, it’s basically a movie-set rom-com meets a brawling comedic action-mystery, packed with a ton of Hollwood inside baseball, a seemingly endless fount of needle drops, all while serving as a showcase for basically any kind of stunt you could ever think of. It’s clear that The Fall Guy is intended to be a love letter to the old days, when big stunt movies like Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, or Smokey and the Bandit, among others, the stories of regular guys doing incredible things and smiling through the pain of getting beaten up while doing it, was a more common thing.

Plus, as I mentioned, because the film is about stuntmen—the artists who put their lives at risk just to get the shot, and often get almost zero recognition for it, which is what the TV show’s theme song is all about—The Fall Guy is packed with incredible stunt work, like a crash with a record-breaking amount of rolls, or a fight that takes pleace on a spinning dumpster being dragged behind a truck, and of course, vehicles jumping over a whole bunch of stuff. And while I do appreciate the way The Fall Guy seems to be trying to push back against all of the all AI-generated shit, all those overly CGI-ed trash heap films, it’s still fair to point out that ultimately, this film is too vapid. Way too vapid.

Yes, this is silly film, and yes, it’s supposed to be. But this is the kind of film where half of its comedy is based on it obviously being self-aware, but it’s just too self-aware. It feels like it’s shooting maybe for a Big Lebowski kind of thing, where a character kind of stumbles into something, and then, like a leaf in a river, gets swept helplessly along through events they have no control over, but this film is not made by the Coen brothers, it was made by the Director of Bullet Train, a film I called “all style and no substance, but without any actual style,” so unsurprisingly, it falls far short.

There’s too many tonal clashes. The script is wildly uneven with the way it treats its characters and what they all have to do in the film. Most of the scenes just don’t flow together well. Weirdly, there’s too much plot, but not in an overly complex way, it’s in an overly busy way. There’s just too much going on here, and most of it’s superfulous. I wasn’t a fan of the whole script, but I feel like a much more streamlined version of it would’ve been much better all around. At the very least, then the film wouldn’t have had half as many problems as it did.  As it is now, The Fall Guy mostly coasts on the charm and charisma of Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, and to be fair, that’s something that can get the film a long ways, because those two are some likable and charismatic mother fuckers on their own, and together… ?

They’re even better. They should be in a better film.

My one nerd complaint? Well, except for the whole theme song thing I mentioned, Winston Duke and Ryan Gosling’s characters have this game they do where Duke’s character will work a movie quote into their conversation, and Gosling’s character has to identify it. It’s a nice little bit of character history establishing stuff…

BUT…

These are are a pair of guys who not only love movies and talk about how much they love movies, but they have worked in them for years, and as a moviehead, I gotta say, the quotes that Duke’s character uses, the ones that Gosling’s character always has to stop and think about? It drove me nuts, because each quote was the kind of movie 101 shit that real movie fans wouldn’t even dignify with a response. They were the kinds of films that are foundational to liking American movies, so they were way too easy to have to guess. Laughably easy. Like, do not cite the deep magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.

So, this didn’t ring true to me at all. I’m not looking for a stump the band contest or anything, but still, put some effort into that. It reminded me of the “I haven’t seen Evil Dead 2 yet” scene in the movie High Fidelity, where they talk about how the movie is so “funny and violent, and the soundtrack kicks fucking ass” and how they also had a conversation afterwards about how the hero made “beretta shotgun ammo off-screen in the 14th century.”

And, for those of you who don’t already know, the problem here is…

A. The whole part about how it’s so “funny and violent, and the soundtrack kicks fucking ass” kind of makes sense in reference to Evil Dead 2, but not really. That said, it definitely makes sense in reference to Reservoir Dogs, the film the characters were talking about in the novel that the movie is based on, which, despite the dialogue in this scene all being nearly word-for-word the same in book and movie, the title of the film they were discussing in the movie was inexplicably changed to Evil Dead 2. Evil Dead 2 is a film that is definitely funny and violent, but it has definitely never had the soundtrack lauded at all, let alone because it “kicks fucking ass.” I have no idea why this was done, except that the script adaptation was written by a filmhead poser.

Oh, is that me being too harsh, you say?

Well then, consider B. The conversation about how the movie made “beretta shotgun ammo off-screen in the 14th century?” And despite the fact the no one would ever say “beretta shotgun ammo,” this is clearly—CLEARLY—a reference to the film Army of Darkness, which is Evil Dead 3. THREE! And there is no one… NO ONE… no one who would consider themselves to be a filmhead, who would ever mistake Evil Dead 2 and Evil Dead 3 for each other.

No one except for a poser, of course, and this drives me absolutely insane.

The fact that the film version of High Fidelity will now sit there forever, just being totally wrong? I hate it. I hate it so much. “Write what you know” is really a bullshit rule when it comes to writing fiction, because how does anyone know anything about fighting aliens on distant planets, or killer robots from the future, or whatever, but still… you gotta get the fucking details right, you fucking hack.

God, I hate that so much! It just… bugs me.

So anyway, that’s how I feel watching Ryan Gosling, who is playing a character that is supposed to be a lifelong movie fan, not to mention a regular part of the making of big Hollywood movies, pretending like he doesn’t immediately recognize the famous and oft-quoted Daniel Day Lewis line from The Last of Mohicans.

I hate it so much.

As for the rest of the movie? Meh. It’s fine.