Save it for later: "The Fall Guy"

The Fall Guy sees Hollywood going postmodern again, much as it did with 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie, 2012's 21 Jump Street and - yes - last year's wildly successful Barbie. It takes the core premise of Glen A. Larson's early Eighties teatime telly favourite (genial stuntman gets into scrapes), then tarts it up with latter-day faces, non-stop winks to the audience that they're watching a silly little (big) movie based on a thin sliver of a show, and endless stunts that somehow looked far more exciting in the trailers we've spent the best part of the last six months sitting through. Nothing else matters, as signalled by the way David Leitch's film shrugs blithely and artlessly past a career-threatening injury its hero suffers inside the opening ten minutes: "no big deal" seems to have been everybody's watchwords here. Drew Pearce's script shambles towards a plot reversal of sorts - Ryan Gosling's Cole Seavers steps off set and into a real-world intrigue involving missing movie star Aaron Taylor-Johnson - then chops back-and-forth between plots A (Hollywood cover-up) and B (Seavers' courtship of director Emily Blunt) with no particular elegance, rhythm or reason. Look, the film pleads with its audience from a very early stage, it's a film based on a show you've most likely forgotten about, so cut us some slack, OK? You'll get to hang out with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt for a couple of hours, so that's something, right? What more do you want from a project like this: rigour, thought and wit? Narrative coherence and character continuity? Basic directorial competence?

Let's give The Fall Guy this: it's amiable, which is no small commodity in the modern blockbuster space. It's even sort of striking to see a $130m summer event movie that looks so conspicuously slung together in the minutes before the cameras started rolling. Yet the mutterings you've heard this long weekend as the film limped to #1 at the box office - that it's not quite funny enough, be that not as funny as it should have been, not as funny as Barbie, or not as funny as it would have been had it been made five years either side of the millennium - aren't in any way inaccurate. Leitch, who's spun a co-director credit on the first John Wick into a licence to make meh (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, Bullet Train), is primarily on board for the stunts, and appears to have left his performers to work through the dialogue scenes themselves. That may explain why Blunt (as the blondest movie character ever to bear the surname Moreno) sounds decidedly under-miked for her first few scenes, and why she pulls on a latex monster mitt in a bid to enliven a midfilm telephone call (something to do, innit); it also allows Teresa Palmer to grab an early laugh by hurling the distinctively Aussie epithet "povvo" at Gosling, before her character disappears in the edit. Indeed, The Fall Guy is so loose for so much of its running time I wondered whether some critical connecting tissue had been yanked from it, perhaps to convert a punchier, adult-leaning thriller into family-friendly knockabout. With its meandering plotting and apparently randomised cutting strategy, it will likely finish as the least directed-seeming studio movie of summer 2024; Leitch believes his role entails no more than emptying vast binbags full of stuff out onto the screen. Taylor Swift songs! A Miami Vice jacket! Lee Majors! Doggos! The Ted Lasso lady! A surprise cameo from an actor who's been in so many indifferent movies and ad campaigns it really counts as no coup whatsoever! This may be all our bigger movies are nowadays: a waiflike barrow boy's increasingly optimistic call of "Stuff! Come and get your stuff!"

They've kept the stunts, at least, although the Leitch idea of stunts is heavily pixellated, punches fixed in post, and he has an unfortunate habit of cutting away from analogue activity just at the point where it starts to get interesting - as a car approaches the end of a ramp, say - so as to patch in visibly reshot material. Much of this Fall Guy has the look of a missed or botched opportunity, if truth be told. You could well imagine a Fall Guy that shot its protagonist out of a cannon from one set to another, and riffed on different kinds of movies and stunts, much as Barbie riffed on differing ideas of femininity. Yet the romance subplot means the one we've ended up with must return doggedly to the one set, where Blunt's Jody is shooting a duff-looking, Rebel Moon-style sand-and-sci-fi actioner. The idea of the movies Pearce is sending up doesn't really need spoofing, and the action that follows from it gets no more dynamic for sticking The Darkness over the top. There are jokes about Thelma & Louise and autocorrect that are so old I think my dad might have workshopped them; and even the mocked-up movie posters on the walls of Cole's trailer (for the likes of "Bad Cop Good Dog" and "The Puncher 2") look secondhand, as if they'd been used before in an episode of 30 Rock or Arrested Development. Well - hey, look - no big deal, as the film grins and shrugs in its very Goslingesque way. Yet after a trend-bucking 2023, Hollywood would appear to be going backwards again so far in 2024, the dream factory becoming a meme machine that demonstrates no real need for anything so antiquated as scripts or directors. You could watch The Fall Guy on a long-haul flight and not feel unduly huffy or ripped off - but absolutely nothing here is forceful or inspired enough to push back against the online commonplace that insists Gosling (and the rest of us) would do better lobbying for a Nice Guys sequel instead.

The Fall Guy is now playing in cinemas nationwide.