If ever there were a dictionary entry for the phrase “Hollywood Stupid”, then it would be under the listing of the Ryan Gosling-Emily Blunt-starrer The Fall Guy.

This is an adaptation of the not-so-serious television show from the early 1980s, starring Lee Majors as a bounty-hunter-cum-stuntman who, according to the show’s title track, “made Eastwood look so fine” on the big screen.

Here the idea goes against the coda of the TV show and stuntmen in general: instead of making actors look so fine, the mission is to make stuntmen (and, by proxy, the lead of this film) appear as bigger stars than the Hollywood actors they are standing in for.

The whole notion is presented with a self-important pretentiousness that befits Bollywood films from the 1980s to the late 2000s. Given the vibe, it is not that hard to reimagine the film as an Akshay Kumar-starrer produced by Sajid Nadiadwala — the collaboration that gave us Kambakht Ishq, a film that is also about stuntmen and Hollywood.

The Fall Guy celebrates the wholesale,widespread idiocy of the fi lm business

Gosling, as full of himself as Majors was (or as Akshay generally is), plays Colt Seavers, the daredevil stunt double of the superstar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who is also full of himself.

Colt, in the midst of a hot and heavy romance with the promising assistant director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), suffers an accident on the set of an expensive action movie, and leaves showbiz to recuperate. A year-and-a-half later, he is yanked back into the biz as a stuntman in an extremely cheesy, big-budget, cowboys-and-aliens/ Mad Max movie directed by ex-flame Jody, and learns that Ryder has been missing for days.

Colt’s face is scanned — as all actors’ faces are in this digital age (the rights of actors in the age of digital doubles is a real-world concern in Hollywood these days) — and he ends up playing most scenes as Ryder (their faces will be swapped when Ryder is found, we’re told).

In between filming, Colt and Jody’s romance, awkward and silly as it is, is rekindled, and he is tasked by the producer (Hannah Waddingham) to find out what happened to Ryder. A trail leading to dead bodies leads to a mystery…NOT!

The film, written by Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw) and directed by David Lietch (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train), is flimsy and corny and not a lot of fun.

Overstuffed with so much banter and exposition that even Colt’s character speaks out about it — that’s too much exposition! he says — this film is a testament of the dumbness of Hollywood. The Fall Guy is meant to be a witty jab on the way Hollywood works but, rather than be a satire that has a good enough story, the film celebrates the wholesale, widespread idiocy of the film business.

Lietch has a few good ideas — a long continuous shot in the beginning of the film and, later, a split-screen exchange between Colt and Jody are worthwhile, though hardly new ideas — but overall, with its uninteresting blocking and by-the-book-coverage shots (solo close-ups of two actors talking), there is little to look forward to cinematically.

The action sequences, mostly all set on the set of Ryder’s film, are meant to show the excess Hollywood indulges in to deliver a big-screen experience. However, what it really speaks volumes of is the lack of direction of the biggest film industry in the world, and how much money goes out in the making of drivel.

I’d rather visit the old show and hope that, 20 years down the line, a better adaptation would be made for the big screen.

Released by HKC and Universal Pictures, The Fall Guy is rated U and is suitable for audiences of all ages…provided that audiences of any age are up to watching mediocrity and excess on the big screen

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 12th, 2024