The Fall Guy Review

Emily Blunt & Ryan Gosling. Tickles your soul to watch two actors famed for their intense, bluesy, stoic roles, now for a change, giggle, flirt and sucker-punch their way through David Leitch's action-comedy extravaganza, The Fall Guy.

Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a seasoned stuntman. And Blunt plays Jody Morena, a director on the set of her debut film, a sci-fi action titled Metalstorm. Colt and Jody's once-hot romance sours after Colt suffers a nasty fall, breaking his back and also his spirit. He retreats from Hollywood and ghosts Jody until a phone call from Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Jody's producer and inveterate beverage-sipper, asks him to come save Jody's movie. Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the star of Metalstorm and a certified a**hole, has gone on a bender, and is now missing. Colt must find him before the studio shuts Jody's film down.

It is Colt's chance to win Jody back, and go back to being a "stuntie", which he does in full flourish on his first day back on set, flipping a car a record-breaking eight-and-a-half times. But rolling cars, setting himself on fire and getting thrashed against rocks is all for nothing if he doesn't get the girl.

Gosling and Blunt don't have to dig deep to pack on the charm. Colt and Jody are, in many ways, Gosling and Blunt: bundles of charisma. Colt and Jody's zippy chemistry is undeniable, even when Jody taunts Colt until he climbs into a car to silently cry to Taylor Swift's All Too Well. And all this happening in sunny Sydney (another win for the city that scored big in Anyone But You), on the sets of Metalstorm, the intergalactic action-romance film set at the edge of the universe starring Space Cowboy and Aliena.

Even as the courtship chugs along, unsure about the third act of Metalstorm, Jody calls up Colt for advice, and wonders if Cowboy might make a grand gesture for Aliena. Of course, she is also referring to Colt & Jody's recently rekindled romance, but she is also director Leitch's mouthpiece pumping us up to anticipate the final act of his film itself. So it's not one, but two levels of meta narrative that Leitch expertly juggles.

Leitch means to make The Fall Guy not just a pyrotechnic love story between a director and a stuntman but also a long overdue ode to Hollywood's stuntmen. And he crafts this love story from the crumbs of Hollywood's greatest action films. In one glass-shatter-everywhere sequence, Colt and his stunt coordinator (Winston Duke) go to Ryder's penthouse to get clues about his whereabouts where they get ambushed by Russian-looking mobsters. Grabbing the rubber hammer and fake gun memorabilia from Ryder's display case, they get to work invoking Daniel Day Lewis in The Last Of The Mohicans, and Dwayne the Rock Johnson throwdowns. All that leads to an epic flaming scene on Sydney Harbour that is straight out of Miami Vice.

The problem with the aggressively self-congratulatory nods to Hollywood is that one may not always be in on the joke. You may think that Metalstorm looks dope and not like a hilariously bad mishmash of Mad Max and Star Wars set to the incantatory score of Dune.

Leitch's films are pulsars of throbbing energy. Here, too, he captures the chaotic frenzy of being on sets of an over-budget film (MetalStorm, that is - not The Fall Guy) through long-rolling shots that make you feel like you are hotfooting Jonathan Cela's camera. The action sequences are as stylish and high-octane fun as we've come to expect from the maker of the slick Bullet Train. There is a chase scene in which Stephanie Hsu, who plays an upstart producer, pelts a guy with her Hydroflask before ejecting him out of the moving truck. And for the third act, look out for helicopters and flying cars.

It is hard to pick a favorite gag. Is it the one with the recurring unicorn? Or the one with a French dog named Jean Claude that lunges at crotches when Colt commands him to "Attacqui!"? Definitely, maybe look out for the scene where Colt radiating major Kenergy emerges from the Sydney Harbour waters. That was the scene where I whispered to myself: Gosling IS Cinema. He entertains in the truest sense of this most anodyne word.

As Jody, Emily Blunt is her most charming, can-make-chemistry-with-a-rock self. They are a killer combo, their only crime being that it's taken this long for them to sync their dates and pair up in a film.

The ending of The Fall Guy is a blur of frenzied action shots featuring colour bombs, fireworks, and a football-field-sized crash mat. You almost forget to sneer at the contrived series of clichés, kidnappings and hot mics that lead up the hammy finale. But Leitch's job is done because the subtext of the film is louder than its text and it reads: "Hey Oscars, please add a Best Stuntman category in recognition of these daredevils".

Who knows, maybe they will.