I saw The Fall Guy in theater 2 at The Grove AMC. Theater 2 is their Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision theater. It’s even got a special Dolby entry way. It’s Dolby-licious. I’d like to start keeping track of the individual theaters in my regular multiplexes because it makes a big difference sometimes and I always forget which one is which. One theater is a lot like the next so it’s easy to think they’re all the same, but they are not the same. Anyway, theater 2 at the grove is nice. New big chairs and all that Dolby shit I just mentioned. Only price you pay is sitting through a 30 second Dolby commercial as part of the epic AMC pre show package which can be used as a buffer if you plan on getting a drink at MacGuffins. More on that later. Nicole Kidman is still generating scattered applause.
My screening opened with the director David Leitch and Ryan Gosling addressing the audience, telling us not to talk or text, but then at the end Gosling jokes that if we have to text, tuck our phones into our jackets. HAHA Ryan except you just told everyone in here it’s ok to text during the movie.
Leitch describes The Fall Guy as a love letter to stunt men. He used to be a stuntman himself, he tells us. Not a good sign. Actually wait, let me back up because there were two bad omens going into this movie. The second was the director of the movie I’m about to see telling me he used to be a stunt man. For the first we have to go back out to the lobby.
If you’ve ever been to the AMC’s at either The Grove or The Americana, two outdoor malls in the greater Los Angeles metro area, you may have noticed a person or two walking into a theater with a glass of wine or a cocktail. “Fun!” you probably thought to yourself. “I wonder where they got that.” Well where they got that is a bar in the lobby called MacGuffins.
MacGuffins Review
MacGuffins is the worst bar in Los Angeles because it is the only bar in Los Angeles where the people serving drinks didn’t sign up to be bartenders. In theory it should be great, a place to meet up before the movie and grab a quick drink, but the people working there, when there are actually people behind the bar, are just regular AMC employees. They’re movie theater kids who I assume have to be 21 and who I also assume have received the bare minimum of bartender training. They are slow and they do not want to be there. Not helping the problem is the fact that you have to present a movie ticket in order to be able to buy a drink. Easy as can be if your friend printed paper tickets and gave one to each person in the group, not as easy if all the tickets are on his phone, in his pocket, slowly making its way through the parking garage. If you are planning on getting a drink at MacGuffins to take into the theater, give yourself an extra 20 minutes.
Back to the first omen. We’re finally at the bar at MacGuffins and the kid working there asks us what we’re going to see. “Fall Guy,” we tell him. “Oh cool!” he beams. “I saw it yesterday it’s really good, it’s by the same guy who directed Bullet Train!” My eyebrows went up and my mouth said “Oh cool!” while my brain said “Fuck” and then “Big fan of Bullet Train are you, son?” Yeah I’m surprised they didn’t splash that all over the advertising. “From the visionary mind that brought you Bullet Train, Deadpool 2, and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw!”
To recap it’s Friday night, theater 2, Dolby, full house and we’re all in the hands of a guy who used to get hit in the head for a living and has a track record of making profoundly average movies.
Let’s get it on.
The Fall Guy is not bad. It’s not good. But it’s not bad. Let’s talk about what’s good.
What’s Good
It stars two pretty people who are pretty funny and most of it is a reasonably good time. Some of my favorite parts were Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt just looking at each other. They’re likable, those two.
It IS a love letter to stunt people. They do a stunt in the beginning that I’m told set some kind of stunt record so that’s cool. They trot out two weathered, older people at the end in what is clearly supposed to be a meaningful cameo that went right over my head. Turns out it’s Lee Majors and Heather Thomas and hey guess what, The Fall Guy is based on an old show that they were in. Part of the problem might be that this movie is just not for me, it’s for stunt people. An odd target demographic maybe, but definitely an underserved one.
Wait this is supposed to be the what’s good section. Ok what else is good. That Dolby, baby. It did sound great in the theater. The car sound effects were intense but not overly so and I found myself actively thinking, “goddamn that sounds badass” while Ryan Gosling, or more probably Ryan Gosling’s stuntman, gunned the engines of whatever vehicle he happened to be in.
I laughed a lot, and in a couple of rare moments The Fall Guy succeeds in achieving the Point Break Effect where you’re laughing with it, and at it at the same time. Where it works as both the thing, and the parody of the thing, in the same moment. Where the ridiculous and the serous swirl into a sublime yin yang and you find total peace, if only for a moment. The boat conversation did that for me.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson is great as Tom Ryder, the douchebag movie star for whom Gosling’s character stunt doubles. He delivers what must be a Matthew McConaughey inspired speech that is so good it might be the highlight of the whole film. Hannah Waddingham is excellent as Gail Meyer the producer and Winston Duke and Stephanie Hsu are both solid but underused.
If you want someone’s opinion other than mine, I can tell you that the gen Z row I was seated in was having an absolute ball. Literally thrashing about in an uncontrollable physiological reaction to what was happening on screen. There was cheering, laughing, and oh so much gasping. And a couple of audible “God damn!”s at Ryan Gosling’s sculpted physique. Same, row. Same.
What’s Bad
For a movie that acknowledges the importance of raising the stakes within its own script, the stakes in The Fall Guy are being stored in a sub-basement somewhere. I thought from the previews that Gosling’s character Colt Seavers was going to get caught up in some international spy ring or deep underground criminal conspiracy like in Spy or The Man Who Knew Too Little only in this version Seavers is a stunt man so he’s good at kicking ass and he’d excel at being a fake spy. Then maybe Blunt gets a camera on him somehow and now all of a sudden we’re making a movie about the spy shit that Gosling is doing and we take down the conspiracy, save the world, and get an exciting, very real seeming, action movie out of it. That is NOT what happens. The Fall Guy never really escapes the orbit of these two petty, small-time assholes. I became increasingly annoyed that the “bad guys” Seavers is running from are just goons hired by an actor.
There’s a scene in the beginning, you’ve seen it before, where Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling are talking about the movie they’re making but they’re actually talking about their relationship, and it’s kind of cute and Gosling is getting lit on fire and thrown into a wall and it’s all fine. But then they keep going back to it, most notably with this LONG split screen scene where they go so deep into the metaphor it borders on complete nonsense. Once was enough; it’s not cute enough to center your entire script around.
Speaking of nonsense, the end is a complete clusterfuck. Really none of the things that happen in the last 15 minutes are logically sound. There are a lot of big stunts so my advice is to just focus on those and try not to listen to anything anyone is saying or figure out who’s flying the helicopter.
Overall
A slightly, slightly above average film which I think makes it David Leitch’s finest work to date. You don’t have to see it, but if you are going to see it, I would see it in the theater, because the flash and the growl do a lot to pave over the script weaknesses. If I had watched it at home I probably would have liked it less. And if you want to test that theory, Bullet Train is on Netflix but it’s leaving soon.
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