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If Crazy, Stupid, Love taught us anything, it’s that even a mediocre movie can benefit from the charms of Ryan Gosling. Unhappily, there’s no saving this spittoon of bad ideas, tragically unfunny zingers and green-screen dreck. Watching Gosling as the titular stuntman turned bounty hunter in this hub of heel-dragging ineptitude is not unlike witnessing a precious artefact disappear into molten ick.
The unconvincing romantic scenes between him and the miscast Emily Blunt, which the script unwisely insists on prioritising over car chases, leave the viewer to wonder if the actors were filmed in separate locations, possibly on separate planes of existence, and then clumsily smudged together in postproduction.
To be fair to Blunt, she has nothing to work with. A blob of indecision, karaoke and tequila shots, her character would embarrass Bridget Jones. As this is a post-MeToo Hollywood product, she gets a girlboss job and a token two-minute action scene. Hooray? Blunt plays Jody, the director of a big-budget sci-fi movie and the springboard for blundering metatextual interplay between The Fall Guy and the film within the film. Look! She mentioned split screen and now we are in split screen!
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Decent stuntwork is continually interrupted by the sappy “love story” and a throwaway Scooby-Doo plot about a missing egomaniacal actor (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his Diet Coke-swilling producer (Hannah Waddingham). Both actors crib villainy notes from Doo labelmates Dick Dastardly and Mutley. They appear to have made up their own movie. Who could blame them? The testicle-biting attack-dog gag stops being fun after the first eight times.
Nobody (surely) was expecting The Godfather from the director of Atomic Blonde and the writer of Hotel Artemis. Nobody (equally) could have anticipated such a dreary mess. Hardworking real-life fall guys (and girls) feature in a postcredits sequence. Didn’t they deserve a better tribute than this ill-conceived nonsense?
The Fall Guy is in cinemas from Thursday, May 2nd
