An early draft of this post was originally published on May 11, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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Here are the Top Ten Possible Letterboxd Reviews for The Fall Guy that I drafted while waiting for the new David Leitch movie to end….
#10
Me, during Ryan Gosling’s opening narration: Every word of this is unnecessary and making the movie worse.
Me, during every line the writers give him for the rest of the film: Every word of this is unnecessary and making the movie worse.
#9.
Only Donald Trump gives himself a smugly self-aggrandizing thumbs-up on camera as often as this movie gives itself one. Roger Ebert would not be amused.
#8.
I can shrug off a bad movie, but I won’t forgive them for spoiling “Without a Trace” — one of the best movie-based hits of the ’80s — by setting it to what I’ll probably remember as the worst scene of the year. Justice for Phil Collins.
#7.
You know something’s gone terribly wrong when a character references Love Actually and you spend the next 15 minutes wishing you were watching that instead.
#6.
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice made me want a mojito. The Fall Guy has cursed the spicy margarita. And that was my favorite drink. That may be the real reason I’m gonna go ahead and dock this an extra half-star.
#5.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, killing it with a mercilessly cartoonish Matthew McConaughey send-up, actually pulled me out of a very deep funk for a few minutes as we rounded what I thought was the final turn.
But then there were more turns.
So many more turns.
#4.
I think the moment the ground fell out from under me came early, when Gosling gets into an SUV, turns on the radio, hears a Taylor Swift song in progress, and cranks it up for pathos. Maximum pandering. Should’ve played it as a jump scare instead. (Oh well… this “hero’s” wannabe catchphrase is “Let’s make bad decisions.”)
#3.
I could have walked into the theater next door and seen Challengers a second time.
Let me say that again: I could have walked into the theater next door and seen Challengers a second time!
#2.
“Here are the Top Ten Letterboxd Reviews for The Fall Guy that I drafted while waiting for this movie to end….”
#1.
Everyone and everything involved just jumped the shark.
After I published that Top Ten List on Letterboxd…
I lay awake late into the night, severely aggravated not only by the movie, but by my discovery that a lot of critics who should know better are excusing this movie’s many mediocrities and flat-out absurdities, calling it “fun” and “exactly what we need right now.” That amounts to a dereliction of duty.
So, here are several more notes I could add to the previous list:
#11.
Hannah Waddingham’s magic in Ted Lasso was in her restraint. This performance is so over-the-top that I think I need to avoid things she’s in now for a long, long time.
#12.
In this movie, characters describe blockbuster action movies as nothing more than medicine wrapped in “sexy bacon” — you know, like when you wrap a pill in meat to make a dog take his medicine.
Jeez.
What a demeaning perspective for any “artist” to have on their work. And we’re supposed to root for these “filmmakers”? If that’s all you require of our action blockbusters, well… you can have them, little doggies. I’m out. I remember summer action movies that were so much better than this.
#13.
Who cares about, or can suspend any disbelief at all for, or even bother tracking this inane narrative?
#14.
Who thinks that these “characters” are actually characters? So, a stuntman and a cinematographer had a lovey-dovey fling, and then he got injured and they didn’t hook up for another year, and she resents this, and this — this — is the tragedy, the crisis at the heart of the picture? This is what we’re hoping to see resolved?
#15.
Come to think of it, don’t bother preaching to us about love either, when you haven’t given us any evidence that love ever had anything to do with it.
#16.
If you’re going to throw in an allusion to another film or show, make it count. Don’t just smirk and be like “Remember Notting Hill?” Get your Last of the Mohicans references out of your mouth, Fall Guy. This movie isn’t worthy to kiss Daniel Day-Lewis’s boot.
#17.
What is Stephanie Hsu doing here when she deserves so much better? If this is the kind of role that an Oscar nomination will get you, what’s the point?
#18.
I’m hearing a lot about how it’s a loving tribute to the art of stuntmen. The thing is, the Mission: Impossible, Mad Max, and Bourne movies — and the Daniel Craig Bond movies too — make me admire and respect stuntmen far more than this because at least those movies have the decency to celebrate and honor them with real screenplays, real cinematography, real creativity, real storytelling, real stakes — aspects that are glaringly absent here. And the action in those movies makes so much more imaginative sense. There is a scene here in which a character is being doused with gasoline — gasoline everywhere! Then, someone lights a match. And somehow, the scene ends with fire only erupting in the places that will allow our hero to escape unharmed. Why didn’t anything else catch fire? I couldn’t even laugh at the absurdity of it — I was already feeling resentful.
#19.
I’m also hearing a lot of people say “It’s fun!” Their ideas of fun are very different than mine. I thought Gosling’s Saturday Night Live opening monologue promoting this movie was ten times more fun than the movie itself.
#20.
I’ve been a fan of summer comedies since high school. But I hold to the apparently unreasonable standard that the jokes suggest they were written. By funny writers. So that they might be lines I find myself repeating and laughing about later. There’s nothing in this movie worth repeating.
#21.
Mark this as the film in which Gosling’s particular personality became too large for any costume, and now all we will see is the Ryan Gosling-ness of him. I hope I’m wrong. I really liked him when he was more of an actor than an idol.
#22.
I guess I’m relieved that a movie by one of the Coen brothers is no longer the most stunningly frustrating movie I’ve seen so far this year.