The Fall Guy is a movie that should have been better than it was.  Ryan Gosling plays a stuntman who had a relationship with a character, played by Emily Blunt, who wants to move up into directing.  He gets hurt on set, and drops off the map.  A couple of years later, when Blunt’s character is directing a movie, he is brought back ostensibly to work on the movie, but actually to be framed for a murder.

Blunt and Gosling have good chemistry, but the movie doesn’t firmly establish their relationship.  Blunt has several scenes where she comes off as sadistic, but it’s not clear that’s what they were going for.  The movie may be suggesting that stuntmen are masochists, but that makes it hard to root for the relationship.

Hannah Waddingham, from Ted Lasso, plays a producer who called Gosling’s character out of retirement to work in the movie that Blunt’s character is directing.  Waddingham is unrecognizable and plays a dynamic character with plenty of charisma.  She is a part in the plot to frame the stuntman for a murder.

That’s the problem with The Fall Guy.  The rekindled love story between the stuntman and the director, with some extra scenes, could have been a movie, but the murder frame-up drives the plot.  The murder frame-up is complex, with a bunch of moving parts and probably doesn’t make much sense.  It’s driven by an action film celebrity character played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. 

The action star doesn’t show up until later in the movie, and seems to be driven by an insecure hatred for the stuntman.  The action star intentionally caused the stuntman’s initial injury that forced him to drop out of the movie industry and is why the stuntman is being framed for a murder.  It’s never clear why the producer is a party to this conspiracy.  If the producer or the action star wanted the stuntman dead, there were easier and more direct ways to make that happen.

All the characters are believable and interesting.  The action scenes are engaging and plausible.  The dialogue moves along crisply and is funny or dramatic, and provides some foreshadowing for events that occur later in the film.  Put it all together, and it doesn’t fit right.  About two-thirds of the way through, it’s hard to care if the producer and action star are going to what they deserve or get away with it.  That makes the movie seem too long.  The Fall Guy is a forgettable, but watchable movie.  6.5/10

Here’s the Critical Drinker’s take on it.