The Fall Guy (2024) - dir. Daviet Leitch
Confession: I never watched the original The Fall Guy tv series. I was a touch too old for it in its heyday, just as I also passed by The A-Team and MacGuyver. My casual googling reveals the series plot there was somethng something Lee Majors is a bounty hunter and something something now he’s a stuntman in order to catch the bad guy. Every week. Ok. We can accept Roadhouse. Why not?
Here, Ryan Gosling is just a stunt guy who for ‘reasons’ has to find and rescue his leading man. Of course, when you are directed by the same guy that directed John Wick, you will abso-goddamn-lutely get your big crash’em’up, blow’em’up quotient and it will include judicious use of CGI (AHEM), but there’s a whole reel over the end credits showing the highly elaborate stunt setups, so stay tuned…
Oh, the movie? It’s actually far more entertaining that it has any right to be, with most of that landing squarely on the charismatic pair of Blunt and Gosling, but it’s light, it’s funny, it goes boom occasionally.
It’s exactly what I needed after emptying my mother’s condo. This whole process is like getting to do ‘a loved one has died’ but in slow motion. So a bit of entertaining zero-brain-required fluff was just what I wanted, and this delivered well above its modest expectations.
