[COLUMN] ​​The Fall Guy is Perhaps Too Self-Aware an '80s Throwback | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The Fall Guy is, like so many of David Leitch’s films, a love letter to the pop culture of the 1980s.

This is obvious in the movie’s basic premise, a very loose adaptation of a television show starring Lee Majors that ran for five seasons on ABC between 1981 and 1986. The series was hardly a huge cultural marker. It peaked at 14th in the Neilsen ratings during its second season, and its largest share was 19.9 in a three-channel race. While The Fall Guy acknowledges its source material, even closing with Majors’ theme song, The Unknown Stuntman, it is not beholden to it.

The Fall Guy is more interested in a broader homage to that entire period of American popular culture. The film’s score, composed by Dominic Lewis, is largely built around sweeping orchestra arrangements of the KISS stadium rock anthem I Was Made for Loving You. The film’s first trailer was set to Bon Jovi’s You Give Love a Bad Name. The second trailer is set to Journey’s Any Way You Want It. When director Jody Merino (Emily Blunt) sings karaoke, she performs Phil Collins’ Against All Odds.

The Fall Guy is about Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), a professional stuntman. Unsurprisingly, the film takes place during the production of a gigantic Hollywood blockbuster. While The Fall Guy is obviously set in the present day, with the team obsessing over the shot for “Hall H”, the film-within-a-film has a distinctly 1980s tinge to it. Metalstorm, starring Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as “Space Cowboy”, is an air metal space opera. The laser guns even look like electric guitars.

Ryder’s previous creative credits include the film Bad Cop, Good Dog, which feels like a rather overt homage to the canine cop movies of the era including Jim Belushi’s K-9 and Tom Hanks’ Turner and Hooch. Tom’s co-star is his own pet dog, one which only responds to commands in French and who answers to the name “Jean Claude”, an obvious homage to perhaps the most eccentric of the 1980s action movie icons. The film even closes with a very retro showreel over the credits.

There is something very curious about this affection for the decade that taste forgot. Colt wears a Miami Vice stunt jacket. Of course, as played by Gosling, Colt is far too young to have been a stuntman on the actual Miami Vice, which overlapped with the final two seasons of The Fall Guy. Instead, Colt’s first gig was working at The Miami Vice Action Spectacular at Universal Studios. Still, the result of all of this is to situate the movie very firmly in the context of the 1980s.

This is an interesting recurring motif within the broader context of director David Leitch’s career. A stuntman-turned-director himself, there is perhaps something just a little autobiographical in the extremely self-aware action pastiche of The Fall Guy. After all, the film’s two leads represent the facets of Leitch’s career: Colt as a stuntman, Jody as a director. As with Leitch’s directorial debut, John Wick which he co-directed with Chad Stahelski, The Fall Guy is a love letter to stunt performers.

Indeed, the two characters’ foils seem like they could be drawn from that particular Hollywood experience. As a professional, Colt chafes against Tom’s assertion that he does “all of his own stunts”, a familiar and perhaps overstated refrain from action stars. As a filmmaker, Jody finds herself in a push-and-pull with producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), who seems eager to steal creative control of Metalstorm away from the young unproven director. It’s all very inside baseball.

However, the nostalgia feels equally specific to Leitch’s interests as a filmmaker. It’s present in the majority of his work. He followed John Wick with Atomic Blonde, a Cold War thriller that was both literally and existentially about the end of the 1980s. Set in Berlin as the Wall came down, its soundtrack was saturated with retro bangers. He followed that with Deadpool 2, a film that – like its predecessor – was firmly rooted in 1980s tropes and conventions, with a plot that is an overt Terminator homage.

To be fair, it is easy to understand why Leitch might harbor a great deal of affection for the 1980s. The decade is frequently described as “the golden age of blockbuster action” or just “the golden age of action.” It was also a great time for stunt performers. Leitch broke into the industry in the late 1990s, most notably as Brad Pitt’s stunt double on Fight Club. However, this was also a point at which Hollywood was moving away from practical effects and towards more computer-generated spectacle.

The Fall Guy is about that shift in both a literal and an abstract way. Colt is an old-fashioned stuntman, who can deliver incredible work on camera. The film itself is framed in such a way as to showcase that work for the audience, in the hope of making them more aware of the work that goes into presenting such action. The film even includes a joke about one of the great illustrations of stunt work as an invisible artform, as Colt has to explain that they don’t give Oscars for stunt work.

However, the movie itself is ostensibly a celebration of the kind of summer movies that don’t really exist anymore, squeezed out of the market by computer-generated sexless superhero sequels. Underneath all its winking self-awareness, The Fall Guy is about a regular dude trying desperately to repair a relationship that he sabotaged. Colt’s entire motivation over the course of the film is to prove himself worthy of Jody’s love, and to earn back the trust he broke with her.

Like quite a few recent releases, such as Sydney Sweeney’s Immaculate and Zendaya’s Challengers, The Fall Guy is a “movie star movie.” Blunt and Gosling are fresh off Academy Award nominations for supporting roles in two of the three biggest movies of last year. They introduced an Oscars presentation together. One of the film’s trailers even pitches The Fall Guy on the fact that it features “Emily M@th?r F#*k!ng Blunt.” The film is very much built around Gosling and Blunt’s charisma.

This is a bold move, particularly in an industry that tends to devalue movie stars at the expense of intellectual property. Christopher Reeve, Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill matter much less to Warner Bros. than Superman does, and there is a sense that audiences have been trained to agree. Building a movie around the idea of watching two beautiful and charming people hang out and fall in love with each other would have been a no-brainer in the 1980s, but it’s a riskier proposition today.

This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of The Fall Guy, and it is something common to a lot of Leitch’s films. To put it simply, as much as The Fall Guy is constructed as an obvious love letter to the way that these sorts of movies used to be made, it also hedges its bets. It refuses to commit wholly and uncompromisingly to the bit. It couches its sincere affection for a craft and style that has drifted out of the mainstream inside layers of winking irony that eat away at the movie’s easy charm.

This was also the case with Deadpool 2, which used the title character’s (Ryan Reynold) self-awareness to undercut a lot of the sincerity. It’s a more extreme version of the sort of humor employed by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a rush to beat the audience to the punchline so that the movie can claim to be laughing along with anybody who can’t get on board with the premise. The Fall Guy falls into a similar sort of trap.

Despite its commitment to its central romance, The Fall Guy refuses to take its premise or its characters particularly seriously. Throughout the movie, stunt coordinator Dan Tucker (Winston Duke) constantly offers Colt sincere advice, only to reveal that he is quoting Rocky Balboa or The Last of the Mohicans. When the film uses the retro aesthetic of split screen during a phone call between Colt and Jody, Jody has to explain at length the purpose of using split screen for such a conversation.

Of course, many of the classic 1980s action movies are frequently very funny. Commando, Bloodsport, Cobra, and many of that wave of action movies frequently tip over into absurdity and borderline surrealism. It’s fair to argue that at least some of that ridiculousness was self-aware. Arnold Schwarzenegger was undoubtedly savvy enough to be in on the joke. However, those films never felt the need to justify themselves to audiences or insulate themselves through self-mockery.

This isn’t just an aesthetic problem with The Fall Guy. It’s a fundamental narrative issue. The film clearly wants to generate tension between Colt and Jody, to create a classic will-they, won’t-they romance. This is good. Mainstream blockbuster cinema sorely needs more passion and energy. However, the film seems too anxious to commit to the possibility of “won’t-they”, which undermines any narrative or character tension.

The Fall Guy begins with a prologue. Colt and Jody are dating. They are in love. Colt has a freak accident. The film joins Colt a year later, where it is revealed that he pushed Jody away during his recovery over a sense of shame. However, Gail rings Colt to hire him to double for Tom on Metalstorm, insisting that Jody asked for him personally. Colt flies to Sydney and arrives on set, only to realize that Jody does not want him there. Things get awkward.

The standard arc of this romance would be a tension running through the first and second acts between the two. Colt would gradually learn that he needs to be more open and vulnerable, underneath the tough stunt guy persona. Jody would learn slowly to forgive him, perhaps even realizing that as a stunt man Colt expresses himself through action rather than through dialogue. Both characters would have a journey, and arrive at the end of the movie having grown.

The Fall Guy seems desperately worried that the audience might not like Colt. As such, it rushes to make everything okay. Colt publicly apologizes to Jody on his first day on set, before the actual plot kicks into gear. Jody seems willing to give him a second chance. There is no sense of actual tension between them, because that all took place off-screen. Colt doesn’t need to change, because he changed in that gap off-screen.

The Fall Guy even reveals that what guilt he does carry – that the accident was a result of his own hubris – is entirely unfounded. The heroes of the kinds of movies that Leitch is emulating were often flawed and complicated figures, but The Fall Guy smooths all of its characters’ rough edges. It’s similar to Zendaya urging audiences not to judge the characters in Challengers “too harshly.” In The Fall Guy, these characters can be bruised, but never broken.

Throughout The Fall Guy, Jody complains about how much she hates the glib stunt guy “thumbs up” gesture, a flippant and stoic response to something very real and very dangerous. She wants something more honest and sincere behind the spectacle. Watching The Fall Guy, one feels something similar.