LE MONDE'S OPINION - WHY NOT?

Loosely inspired by the 1980s series The Fall Guy, which followed the adventures of a Hollywood stuntman, The Fall Guy movie promised, on paper, to be one of those pyrotechnic entertainments reviving an artisanal definition of action, where the scale of the staging would capture the tribulations of a body in space, somewhere between Buster Keaton and the Mission Impossible saga.

Still fresh from his role as Ken in Barbie, Ryan Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, a Hollywood studio stuntman who suffers a serious accident on set and is forced to end his career. He is reunited with his former agent six years later. Now a valet, he is asked to fill in at the drop of a hat for a leading lady's understudy on the blockbuster Metalstorm. Directing this sci-fi film is Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), who, before the accident, was having a budding relationship with Colt. Since then, he disappeared without a trace and she is furious with him.

The shoot is the occasion for a little revenge, with Jody taking advantage of the stunt scenes to put the cad to the test and the Metalstorm script is largely inspired by their story.

The Fall Guy is a permanent deconstruction between fiction and reality. This could have been both playful and delightful if director David Leitch, himself a trained stuntman who once doubled for Jean-Claude Van Damme, hadn't quickly become overwhelmed by his vision, in which action film and romantic comedy intertwine and prolong each other. The action scenes are like damp squibs made unintelligible by the editing.

And there's no sense of rapport between Blunt, strangely confined to the role of a director more obsessed with her heartbreak than with filming, and Gosling, who, in the role of Hollywood's coolest actor, ends up wearing out his welcome.

Above all, it's as if The Fall Guy has forgotten precisely how to play with the gold dust it has in its hands: The shadowy figure of the stuntman, brought up to date by Quentin Tarantino's magnificent Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019). The film prefers to stuff itself with peripheral issues, starting with a dispensable thriller plot and tons of winks and Meta jokes. It seems to suffer from the same malady as its hero: The Fall Guy is strangely afraid of emptiness.

American film by David Leitch. With Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (2.05 hours).