The Fall Guy Review

Logan Holladay rolls a car eight and a half times down a Sydney beach, takes a world record doing it, and David Leitch cuts to the crew screaming at the monitor rather than moving on. That instinct is the best thing about the film. The opening fall, twelve stories onto an airbag and a landing that goes wrong, is staged wide and held long enough to register as a body in the air rather than as a cut. Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers as cheerful about being set on fire and miserable about everything else, and his scenes with Emily Blunt find a screwball rhythm the plot keeps interrupting.

Blunt is very funny directing a second unit while sulking. The murder plot is the problem. Around the ninety minute mark the film stops being about the work and starts chasing a corpse in a hotel bathtub, a phone with incriminating video on it, and a villain turn that Aaron Taylor-Johnson is given far too little screen time to sell. Split screens and a Taylor Swift needle drop cannot disguise a second hour that has errands to run instead of stunts to perform.