Theme song!
As a child, my greatest hero was Lee Majors, and my favorite series was not Lee Majors The Six Million Dollar Manbut Dangerous profession. I don’t remember anything about the series at all, apart from the premise: Majors played Colt Seavers, a stuntman who, to make ends meet, was a private investigator. Kind of like Mitch Buchannon in Baywatch Nights. I honestly don’t even know why Lee Majors encouraged me so much, but I can put forward a hypothesis: he was a sort of self-propelled GI Joe puppet, practically Big Jim himself. The American with the square jaw, the ironic look of someone who is always ten moves ahead of everyone and is not afraid of anything / he has seen it all. The classic hero that as a child you identify with your father or at most you would like as a cool uncle.
Fast forward to 40 years later: it comes out in theaters The Fall Guythe new film by our friend David Leitch, a very free adaptation of the series (created, it is worth remembering, by that idiot Glen A. Larson, author of Battlestar Galactica, Magnum PI And Supercars). And by “very free” I mean that, apart from the names of the protagonists (one and a half, to be very generous), and the general development in the world of Hollywood cinema, it really has nothing to do with the original series, to the point which even our friends Titolisti Italiani™ have chosen not to translate The Fall Guy with Dangerous profession, but to leave the original title directly. “Who on earth”, they must have rightly asked themselves, “will go to see this film because they are a fan of a little-known series from forty years ago?”. Here I am!
“I knew I could count on you, George!”
Come on, that’s not really true, I think I would have gone to see The Fall Guy anyway, but the fact of having the cinema imprint of leading Larson’s series gave me that extra push. The rest was done by the David Leitch/Ryan Gosling pairing. On the one hand there is a director who, with John Wick And Atomic Blonde, has given us a lot, and to whom we are still willing to give the benefit of the doubt despite some not exactly happy career choices, because even in the most derivative and carefully studied products he still demonstrates his very solid hand. On the other hand there is an actor who simply makes me laugh a lot.
Remember when Ryan Gosling made serious films? Me niether. And yet, oh, the Internet tells me it happened: The Ides of March, Come Thunder, Drive, Only God Forgives, La La Land, Blade Runner 2049, The First Man. Ryan really tried to position himself as a credible dramatic actor, then Shane Black came along and told him: “No, you’re funny”, and, since Shane Black is always right about everything, Ryan took note and acted accordingly. Thus it was discovered that Ryan Gosling was naturally gifted for comedy, gifted with crazy comic timing and a one-of-a-kind slap face, combined with a versatility certainly superior to that of another actor who chose the same path as him. , Chris Hemsworth. For Ryan it was a watershed moment Barbiethe film that won him a prestigious Sylvester and turned him into a living meme.
Metrosexual.
Ryan Gosling is not, in short, the new Lee Majors. Majors represented the old guard, he was the virile white male, the man he must never ask for. Gosling is the modern man, who does not hide his frailties and is not ashamed of dressing colorfully. In a word: metrosexual. His Colt Seavers is practically Ken’s Barbie in a stuntman version in the “real world”: there he sang “I’m just Ken”, giving voice to the performance anxiety of all men raised with the myth of virility at all costs. Here he is crying in the car listening to Taylor Swift after finding out that maybe his ex doesn’t want him anymore. At more than one moment, especially when Colt interacts with colleague/best friend Dan Tucker (the always excellent Winston Duke), I thought of Terence Hill. Beyond the physical similarities, Hill was also able to build a character to successfully portray film after film, and Gosling seems to be headed down this path. We’ll find out how successful it is in a few films: will it piss us off or win us over? For now I like him, but I recognize that in the long run he could become as cloying as any Johnny Depp.
On the other hand, there has already been a film in which the dynamic between Ryan Gosling and his co-star reminded us of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill: I’m obviously talking about The Nice Guys. It is clear that The Fall Guy (even the title is similar, upon closer inspection) aspires to be a film by Shane Black, and perhaps it is no coincidence that Drew Pearce, who worked with Black on Iron Man 3 (and, okay, he wrote for Leitch too Hobbs & Shaw). He aspires but doesn’t quite succeed, for obvious reasons: Drew Pearce is certainly not Shane Black, and David Leitch makes a completely different type of cinema. Yet the idea is that: action with protagonists who make clever jokes and take the piss out of themselves. To this Pearce and Leitch add a very strong, predominant rom-com element. The Chief has already said it and he is absolutely right: The Fall Guy it is first of all a rom-com and secondly an action. It’s not an action film with a romantic element, but a rom-com with action elements, complete with I Was Made For Lovin’ You by Kiss as the main theme of the soundtrack. As I watched it I came to think: this must be a worthy exception.
Typical rom-com moments.
If this is not entirely the case it is because, it must be admitted, David Leitch still has an edge over his colleagues in managing the action system. The Fall Guy It’s directed by God, the beating scenes (the hallucinated one in the disco, with the neo-style lights Atomic Blonde, above all) and the chases are a pleasure, all shot as they should, clear and very straight. Leitch is a former stuntman and you can clearly see who he wanted to use The Fall Guy to talk about colleagues, about their vision of the world in an industry that idolizes stars and tends to forget them. We’re ready to cheer for an actor who reveals that he does his own stunts, knowing that at best he’s blowing things out of proportion (unless his name is Tom Cruise), but we can’t remember the names of those that they do those difficult and very dangerous things every single day of their lives to bring home bread. Yet, Leitch tells us, their contribution to a film is equally, if not more important than that of the stars on the bill. What would have been Mad Max: Fury Road without Guy Norris, stunt coordinator, seventy years old like George Miller at the time of filming, who crashed the Tanker in the desert?
Leitch tells us this in two ways: on the one hand by creating the character of Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a spoiled superstar and perfect emblem of toxic masculinity, who masks his insecurity by proclaiming that he does his own stunts when in reality he is a coward. Ryder is the sum of all the evils of Hollywood conveniently distilled into one person, the perfect counterpart to his stunt double Colt Seavers. On the other hand, Leitch literally makes the characters and the film say the things they care about, brings up the post-strike Hollywood of 2023, the use of artificial intelligence and deepfake in cinema, the use of CGI as an easy alternative to real stunts (who do you want to notice the difference anyway?) vs. the debate on the recognition of stuntmen at the Oscars.
Evil.
It’s obvious which side Leitch is on: there’s no story, CGI is evil, and real, dangerous, sweaty stunts are good. Indeed, it will be a very complex stunt that will reveal, in the finale, the truth about the conspiracy that Colt Seavers found himself investigating. From this point of view, The Fall Guy it is a very Manichean film, which celebrates concrete, hand-made cinema without hesitation, and condemns the falseness prevalent in Hollywood blockbusters. It’s funny that this is done by a Hollywood blockbuster, a film-produced based on a TV series and starring mega-stars, but Leitch seems to realize this and, almost by way of apology, goes so far as to openly denounce product placement – aexcusatio non petita which we give him credit for, because it is done with irony.
This Gascon conservatism is balanced, for the rest, by a more progressive vision, especially on the role of women in the Hollywood industry: Emily Blunt plays a new version of Heather Thomas’ Jody Banks, who is not surprisingly called something a little different, Jody Moreno. Or rather: the fact that she is called “Jody” is a pure homage to the series, because otherwise this Jody is a completely new character. To begin with, she is not a stuntwoman, but a former camera operator turned director (of Metalstorma film that steals its title and tagline from an old Charles Band film, he recalls Dunes and has a logo halfway between Metallica and Iron Maiden <3). She's not even a damsel in distress: when she has to, she knows how to fight and defend herself. The film carefully avoids, then, building around her the obvious subplot of the inexperienced director who struggles to assert herself: her status within the production is never questioned by anyone, if anything the problems are different, they are all due to the male star and she is instead the force that holds together a rickety shack. Jody also has her counterpart in Gail Meyer, the veteran producer (played by Hannah Waddingham, a fantastic discovery of Ted Lasso), extremely manipulative, willing to do anything to get the job done. If on the one hand this man/man, woman/woman comparison is a bit obvious, we must remember that we are not seeing an indie denunciation, but a fat, big commercial film.
Mad Max: Funny Road.
Not everything was successful: for example, it would have been nice if Pearce and Leitch had given Tom Ryder more personality, rather than simply describing him as a two-dimensional puppet, because if he had been more defined perhaps we would have laughed more. The Fall Guy unfortunately, it is not very subtle and often encounters predictable and already seen moments. It has no real flashes of genius, but simply follows a series of trends and does so in the most correct and least divisive way possible. At a certain point, then, he weakens considerably and is revived by an ending with some good ideas, even if he never manages to shake off the stench of TV crime fiction. Yet, if nothing else, he tries to tell us the behind the scenes of Hollywood films from below, from the point of view of the laborers and artisans who make cinema for a living, telling us that they are the real heroes. I’m satisfy.
Final theme song!
PS: This piece, the theme song of the TV series, is also used in the film over the end credits, where a lot of space is given to the making of the film and we are shown the stuntmen at work. Yet, although the message of the film is to give a name and a face to these professionals, and although we are shown Ryan Gosling in the company of his stuntmen, including Logan Holladay and Justin Eaton, their names are not particularly highlighted in the credits. Sin.
Toxic masculinity quotes:
“More Terence Hill than Lee Majors”
George Rohmer, i400Calci.com
>> IMDb | Trailer
