FILM REVIEWS
THE FALL GUY
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Director: David Leitch
Category: IIA
4/5 stars
As part of Hollywood’s increasingly desperate trawl through the archives for viable IP, the powers that be have settled on The Fall Guy.
The US television series, starring Lee Majors as a stuntman turned bounty hunter, ran for five seasons in the 1980s, but it is hard to argue this is a fondly thought-of show that generates waves of nostalgia.
Perhaps that works in its favour, for David Leitch’s reimagining is an action-comedy that leans on the romantic chemistry between its leads. Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a veteran stunt performer who is romancing Emily Blunt’s camera operator Jody Moreno. For the past six years, Seavers has doubled for A-list action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but then a stunt goes disastrously wrong, leaving him injured and forced to make a living as a valet.
Out of the blue, Seavers gets a call from top producer Gail Meyer
(Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham) and soon is heading to Australia – only to find that Jody, who he has ghosted in the intervening 18 months, is the director of a new sci-fi spectacular called Metalstorm.
From here, The Fall Guy channels detective vibes, as Seavers is instructed to look for its star, Ryder, who has gone missing.
A former stuntman, Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet
Train) is ideally cast as the director here – and he more than delivers. The action scenes, especially a speedboat chase through Sydney Harbour, are fun-packed but always in service of the story.
Gosling and Blunt make for a fabulous double act, as they flirt over the prospect of spicy margaritas in the middle of shooting a dangerous set piece.
There are plenty of pokes at Hollywood in the script by Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3), but there’s nothing cynical about The Fall Guy
– it never feels like it is biting the hand that feeds in any malicious way.
Ryder has a ball as the self-involved superstar, while Waddingham is equally riotous as the producer who stalks the set in killer heels.
With a star cameo and an end credits sequence that shows the real stuntmen on The Fall Guy performing their duties, there is also a lot of love for these unsung heroes of the film business.
The connection to the original television series may be tenuous at best – and the final act is way too long – but it scarcely matters when Gosling and Blunt are acing it on screen. The Fall Guy is the funniest mainstream film so far this year. James Mottram
The Fall Guy opens in cinemas today
SUSPECT
Starring: Nick Cheung, Zhang Yishang
Director: Sam Wong
Category: IIB (Cantonese)
1/5 stars
If there is one thing that Suspect director and co-screenwriter Sam Wong Ming-sing should learn to become a better filmmaker, it’s that less can very well be more.
An experienced martial arts director who was once a leader in the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, Wong (Choy Lee Fut) has come up with enough incongruous story ideas and flashy visuals in his latest directing effort to fill three films.
A pulpy, inconsistent and often laughable blend of fantasy action and murder mystery, Suspect features an outlandish vigilante anti-hero, epic revenge plots, wacky dives into the “subconscious”, and at least two psychological gimmicks that play like magic.
One of these superhuman conditions – hyperthymesia, an extreme version of photographic memory – belongs to master sleuth Kwok Man-bun, played by crime drama veteran Nick Cheung Ka-fai with a nod and a wink that suggest he realises this is all nonsense.
In a series of highly stylised and utterly stupid set pieces, Wong shows us Kwok’s journeys into his own imagination; these play like a costume party attended by several Nick Cheungs, each one dressed for a different personality. While it’s never clear how these vignettes help him solve his cases, they do look unintentionally funny.
When we first meet Kwok, he is a former police detective who has quit the force after a traumatic incident in which his twin brother was murdered in front of him and his memory failed at the key moment.
He is brought in from the cold when a bizarre murder case claims a morally questionable member of society and an employee at a video game company, May Chou (Zhang Yishang), turns herself in, asks for Kwok, and foretells more ritualistic killings of other bad apples.
Although Suspect introduces us to a mythical serial killer called the Ghost Judge, and indulges in computer effects to illustrate how the victims are punished by supernatural forces, it becomes obvious almost too quickly that all the film’s fantastical scenes take place solely in the minds of characters under hypnosis.
As Kwok tracks down the culprit while fighting his own demons on the side, Suspect continues to bombard its audience with more genre clichés than most self-respecting filmmakers would play with.
For Hong Kong cinema fans, it may at least be worth noting that the cast also includes Niki Chow Lai-kei as Kwok’s psychotherapist, Patrick Tam Yiu-man as his police colleague, and Michael Tong Man-lung as a shady hypnotist who promises to return in a bigger role should this sorry production ever spawn a sequel. Edmund Lee
Suspect opens in cinemas today