Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt put up a charming fight, but The Fall Guy pulls its punches and punchlines

• The Fall Guy
• Directed by David Leitch
• Written by Drew Pearce, based on the television series created by Glen A. Larson
• Starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt and Aaron Taylor-Johnson
• Classification PG; 126 minutes
• Opens in theatres May 3

A stunt-centric movie that winks and nudges its audience so aggressively that injured moviegoers might have cause to file a class-action lawsuit, The Fall Guy arrives at a curious, even calamitous time for what was once the most reliable of Hollywood staples: the action-comedy.

No longer can you slap together two big stars, some high-calibre explosives and a half-dozen decent quips and watch the dollars roll in. Now, everything must have an air of vaguely familiar intellectual property to its name, or at the very least the presence of Ryan Reynolds, who seems to be single-handedly keeping the genre alive, or at least brain-dead breathing, with Deadpool, Red Notice, Free Guy, etc.

On those two counts, director David Leitch’s The Fall Guy half-checks both boxes, being an adaptation of the long-ago television series starring Lee Majors (surely the biggest of draws for today’s audiences?) and headlined by the more enjoyable of contemporary Hollywood’s two favourite Canadian Ryans (that’d be Gosling by a mile, or 1.6 kilometres).

So, yes, it is understandable how this version of The Fall Guy came to exist. But if the movie is where the action-comedy genre is headed – and given Leitch’s in-demand status, the Deadpool 2 and Bullet Train filmmaker is nothing if not in the centre of today’s guns-and-gags canon – then we’re all set for a future of pulled punches, and punchlines.

Essentially a hyper-adrenalized blend of Ben Stiller’s film-industry comedy Tropic Thunder and Wes Anderson’s famed American Express commercial (in which the natty auteur waltzes his way through a chaotic film shoot), The Fall Guy follows the making of a Hollywood blockbuster through the eyes of two of the most adorable, beautiful people in the world (both ours, and the fictional universe of the film within this film).

Behind the camera is Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a peppy and ambitious director who is making her feature debut with some sci-fi junk called Metalstorm. On the other side is ace stuntman Colt Seavers (Gosling), who once enjoyed a fling with Jody while shooting another film, but ghosted her after he suffered a near-fatal accident on set. Through the machinations of a manic Diet Coke-swilling producer named Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Colt is recruited to join Jody on the Sydney, Australia, set of Metalstorm. Ostensibly, he’s been hired to act as the stunt-double for the film’s egomaniacal star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but really he’s there to solve the mystery of the leading man’s sudden disappearance, and to save Jody’s film.

Open this photo in gallery:

That set-up, which has about as much in common with the original TV series as I do with Gosling, is just cute enough to work, layered as it is with the kind of romance, comedy and feather-light Hollywood satire that should go down easy. And for a good hour or so, Leitch and company deliver.

The films opens with an impressive “oner” (a single long take that has become shorthand for directors looking to prove their technical wizardry) that pulls off an impressive triple act: it not only establishes Colt and Jody’s relationship, but also cements Leitch’s commitment to engaging in, and at the same time lightly subverting, a game of spot-the-Hollywood-trickery shtick. Meanwhile, Gosling and Blunt – the two MVPs of last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon – are ridiculously and irresistibly charming.

And though it might not arrive like a typical message movie, The Fall Guy cannon-rolls into theatres with an ambitious, important argument up its fireproof sleeve: stunt professionals have for too long been ignored or worse by the film industry, even though the entire blockbuster machine depends on their creativity and courage. The fact that the Oscars still refuse to give stunt pros their own awards category is a true shame.

Yet if The Fall Guy is Leitch’s tribute to his second-unit comrades – the director spent decades in the stunt world before making the jump to directing with the first John Wick film – it lands with the thwack of a dozen faux beat-downs too many. This is a movie that shoots first and asks questions never, its smarmy script so full of holes and its aesthetic instincts so cocky that you cannot help but feel pummelled instead of charmed.

The unforced errors are plentiful, from the one-twist-too-many missing-persons plot at its core to the overextended third act, which pumps out a final set-piece that – while impressive in scope and execution – is exhausting to endure. Then there are the film’s half-cooked meta-contextual elements, which begin as clever (like that opening “oner”) but then slowly blur the line between being self-aware and self-destructive.

The Fall Guy paints Jody’s movie Metalstorm, a kind of interstellar Romeo and Juliet that Zack Snyder might make at his lowest ebb, as the latest in a long line of mindless blockbusters. Yet Leitch’s film ain’t exactly Mensa-level. I’m not even sure that it could pass what I’m going to informally dub The Player Test. i.e., if the movie could be reasonably produced by the crass studio-executive characters in Robert Altman’s blistering 1992 Hollywood comedy, its satirical bona fides are not to be taken seriously.

The film’s most egregious misstep, though, is sabotaging its own best stunt: the high-wire chemistry between Gosling and Blunt.

After offering a short and sweet taste of the pair’s ability to bounce off one another, Leitch physically separates the two for almost the entire second act and far too much of the third. Sure, it’s fun to watch Gosling (playing a stuntman for the second time after 2011′s Drive) haplessly bounce from one violent antic to the next, just as there is joy to be found in seeing Blunt (adopting a slightly wispier voice than normal) bring a delicately light touch of screwball comedy to Jody’s travails. But too often, The Fall Guy is bizarrely determined to throw its heavenly match.

As a sizzle reel of top-notch stunt work, Leitch’s film should compel the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to reconsider its shameful ignorance of the field. But as a would-be summer blockbuster, it’s a movie that Jody herself might have passed on helming.