The Fall Guy

2hrs 6mins (12A)

Action comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt ★★★

Ryan Gosling “stole the show as himbo Ken in Barbie”, and he does it “all over again in David Leitch’s The Fall Guy”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. “For those who thought Ken should have his own movie, here it is.” Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a stunt double who is recovering from an accident on set when he lands a job on a schlocky action movie being directed by his ex, Jody (Emily Blunt). “Colt is desperate to get back together with her”, but she wants to keep things “profesh”; and when the film’s lead (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) goes missing, Colt is dispatched to go and find him. Plot-wise, The Fall Guy “is basically the thinnest of Scooby-Doo mysteries”, but it is strung out along a series of action set-pieces in which the director, himself a former stunt man, “shows off his sense of timing and choreography”, while supplying Blunt and Gosling with plenty of “flirty banter”. Hollywood doesn’t make many films like this anymore, and the fact that it’s “actually good is a minor miracle. The downside is it cost $125m, so go see it or they’ll never make another.”

The roles aren’t much of a stretch for Gosling and Blunt, but this is a “gloriously fun” film that is “crying out to be enjoyed with a big old bucket of popcorn”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. “It’s also surprisingly interesting about stunt work itself.” Well, it struck me as pretty vacuous, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. The film (based on a 1980s TV show) is pitched as a celebration of the work of stunt doubles. But there are so many pyrotechnic stunt sequences, you lose sight of the skills involved and it ends up as just “empty noise”. The screenplay is so slapdash, you wonder if it has suffered one too many knocks to the head; and Gosling’s performance feels “curiously half baked”.