Movie Review

Ryan Gosling champions the Hollywood stunt man in The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy.

Photo by Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures

For a profession that has been integral to the movie industry from the very start, it’s kind of strange what little public attention stunt performers get. By design, their faces are rarely seen and despite a push by some big names in Hollywood, they have yet to get recognized in a category at the Academy Awards. If the new movie The Fall Guy has anything to say about it, that will soon change.

Inspired by the ‘80s TV show of the same name, the film stars Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a longtime stuntman who is currently the double for action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). As the film begins, he’s in a relationship with Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a camera operator with aspirations to become a director one day. A freak accident puts Colt’s career on pause for a while, while Jody is given her big shot by producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham).

Soon enough, Colt is called back into service by Gail to help out on Jody’s sci-fi epic, Metal Storm, shooting in Australia. While he does get to show some of his stunt abilities on the film, he finds out that the real reason Gail asked for him is that Tom has gone missing after falling in with a criminal group, and she wants Colt to track Tom down. What ensues is a meta film in which a stunt man is asked to perform some real-life heroics while still hoping to get the girl in the end.

Directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, the film is totally ridiculous, sometimes in really good way and sometimes in a bad way. The meta-ness of the film starts right away, with the making of the films within the film being the focus, featuring plenty of references or allusions to the actual Hollywood industry and real stars. They have lots of fun in this respect, rarely passing by an opportunity to wink at the audience to let them know they’re in on the joke.

The stunts, of course, are the star of the show, and Leitch – a longtime stunt man/stunt coordinator – is the perfect person to showcase them in all their glory. However, instead of the near-constant action seen in Leitch films like Bullet Train or Deadpool 2, he goes for quality over quantity here. He also includes smaller moments that humorously comment on the fact that Colt is a stunt man doing “real” stunts, continuing the overall theme of the film.

It’s hard to have it all, though, and where the film falters is in its storytelling. While Gosling and Blunt have been a delight promoting the movie together at the Oscars and on SNL, their chemistry in the film is somewhat lacking. That’s mostly because Pearce never finds a way to make the audience truly invest in their characters’ relationship. Almost every other character is one-note, serving merely as vehicles to propel the film to the next big stunt sequence.

Prior to Barbie, it was safe to say that Gosling was in a lull in his career, but his charm in that film and this one have put him right back on top again. If a couple of line readings (“spicy margarita”) have him still in Ken mode, you can forgive him. Blunt is also good, but her role doesn’t give her quite as much to do as Gosling. Taylor-Johnson and Waddingham dial it up to 11 for their respective roles, an idea that works for Taylor-Johnson since he’s playing an action star, but doesn’t do Waddingham any favors (and neither does her odd wig).

The Fall Guy is a fun if imperfect film that does exactly what it was intended to do: Showcase the stunt community in all its glory. It would have been nice if the filmmakers had paid as much attention to the story as they did the action, but that probably would have gotten in the way of all of the explosions and fighting.

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The Fall Guy opens in theaters on May 3.

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Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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