The Fall Guy review: Stuntman Ryan Gosling steals the show... and his screen chemistry with Emily Blunt is the real deal, writes BRIAN VINER

The Fall Guy (12A, 126 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: A trip  

Ryan Gosling was interviewed on stage before a preview screening of The Fall Guy in London last week, concluding his rhapsodies about the 'real heroes' of action movies with a plea. 

'Give stunts an Oscar,' he entreated. He's right. It's high time.

The Fall Guy is a much less interesting film than Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, but at one level it does the same thing, elevating the stunt double, a performer who by definition is usually anonymous, to the status of leading man. 

The equivalent here of Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth in Tarantino's 2019 barnstormer is Gosling's Colt Seavers, the best 'fall guy' in the business, who risks life and limb for the greater glory of a narcissistic star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).

David Leitch's film is notionally inspired by the 1980s TV series of the same title, and indeed there is a 1980s action-movie feel to it, popcorn entertainment that falters whenever it takes itself and its corny narrative too seriously.

When we meet Colt, he has been swept off his feet not by a CGI wave or an exploding shell but by a pretty English camera operator, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). 

Alas, their passionate relationship is torpedoed when Colt breaks his back after a stunt goes disastrously wrong. 

He withdraws from her, and from movie work generally, but 18 months later he is persuaded back, to work on a Tom Ryder sci-fi blockbuster being filmed in Australia. 

The film's first-time director is… Jody Moreno.

She's startled by his sudden reappearance, and seemingly none too delighted, but she and her movie need his expertise. 

Moreover, she is unaware that Ryder, her slimy star, has fallen in with some disreputable rascals and gone missing. 

The film's shrill English producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham, best known for the TV show Ted Lasso), believes that Colt is the person best equipped to return Ryder to the production. 

Colt's other, evidently tougher challenge is to win back Jody.

That's the plot in a nutshell, and a nutshell is all it needs: it's silly and implausible. But Gosling and Blunt jointly have enough charisma to give it most of the necessary heft. 

From where I was sitting it still ran out of steam about two-thirds of the way through and became an exercise in a kind of high-energy tedium, but in fairness there were plenty around me in the cinema who manifestly loved it throughout.

Moreover, as a celebration of stunts and those who fearlessly perform them, The Fall Guy can't be faulted. 

Some of the fights, crashes and chases are genuinely spectacular, if never quite up there with the Mission: Impossible movies.

As it happens, the screenplay is by Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation writer Drew Pearce, and it has been rightly criticised for a bad-taste joke about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, one of numerous references to real-life stars and their movies (Harrison Ford, The Fugitive, Jason Bourne, Miami Vice, Thelma & Louise, even Notting Hill, Love Actually and Pretty Woman) that are meant to be part of the fun, pumping up the sense of an industry chuckling at itself.

If, amid all the self-referential swagger, The Fall Guy does succeed in getting the Academy Awards to recognise stunt choreography, then it will earn itself a significant footnote in cinematic history. 

We'll see. In the meantime, its big achievement is in putting Gosling and Blunt together for the first time. 

They have proper screen chemistry.

The Fall Guy is in cinemas.