Turning an ’80s TV series into a movie might be the epitome of Millennial mindlessness. In that sense, The Fall Guy is a perfectly idiotic product. Based on the television series that retooled The Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as a show-business stunt coordinator who also solved crimes, this facetious film adaptation stars Ryan Gosling, not quite a replacement for towering tough-guy Majors. As the titular Hollywood stuntman, Gosling is as bland as always. Every Gosling performance — whether the Plasticine eunuch Ken in Barbie or the junkie schoolteacher in Half Nelson, a psychotic getaway man in Drive or a jazz pianist in La La Land — seems unreal, a kind of stunt. Gosling may not be a CIA psyop like Taylor Swift, but he has a similar vapid persona, and his ubiquitous presence in the culture (he won’t go away) makes him equally dismaying.

Playing stuntman Colt Seavers who suffers a mid-career setback after recovering from an injurious performance, Gosling stands in for the public’s disaffected relationship to Hollywood. Colt re-ups for his athletic-masochist profession when his ex-lover, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), directs a sci-fi action blockbuster. The new gig on location in Australia gives him an opportunity to reunite with her. Lots of stunts, explosions, and F/X gimmicks are interweaved, along with dim-witted, screwball-comedy romantic banter. All of the film’s fatuousness substitutes for the lack of relatable substance in contemporary Hollywood product. The Fall Guy blazons the insipid content that the movie industry never tires of selling us.

Understand this: The Fall Guy offers a tabloid premise, withholding insight into its protagonist’s private life while pretending vicarious simulations of our own. Its “fun” and “excitement” are as hollow as Gosling himself. The film’s only twist occurs when Colt (a porn-star name) doubles for a vain movie star, Tom Ryder played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a more intensely appealing actor than Gosling, who imitates the also more-appealing Tom Cruise but with the distinction of Taylor-Johnson’s particular erotic threat and proven acting skill (Nowhere Boy, Nocturnal Animals, Bullet Train). Taylor-Johnson’s screen impact altogether surpasses Gosling’s fake stardom.

Colt’s off-set exploits in Australia are complicated by Tom Ryder’s sudden disappearance, but this complication has no resonance. As an opportunity for more pointless action stunts, it’s meaningless. (Think back to the behind-the-scenes political revelations that a star’s disappearance revealed in the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!) This is how director David Leitch and screenwriter Drew Pearce pretend to give insight into the movie-making process, but they never come close to the industry exposé of Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man, from 1980, in which Peter O’Toole, Allen Garfield, and Barbara Hershey satirized the personal eccentricities and professional duplicity within the world of make-believe.

Gosling’s winks, smiles, and shallow bravura are not sufficient to take us past the hoodwink of Millennial Hollywood. And Blunt’s usual lack of charisma ruins what enthusiasm we’re supposed to feel about the social progress of a woman taking the helm on a juvenile male-oriented action flick. (Timely references to Jody’s capabilities leave out the actual ineptitude of real-life diversity hires on action films, evidenced by Chloé Zhao, Patty Jenkins, and Ava DuVernay.)

Here’s where The Fall Guy betrays the recent phenomenon of stuntmen-turned-director Chad Stahelski, who guided the phantasmagoric John Wick: Chapter 4. (Leitch shared duties with Stahelski on the first John Wick, then went on to direct the undistinguished thrill-ride movies Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train, and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw.)

The miracle of John Wick: Chapter 4 consisted of Stahelski elevating the acrobatic grace and know-how of stunt work into a choreographic vision of human aggression and cinematic wit. Stahelski frequently referenced Buster Keaton kineticism with such style that he elevated the John Wick movies to a level of visionary abstract art. John Wick: Chapter 4 was the best film of 2023 because it wasn’t simply about violence like a video game; it offered a fantasy of violent retribution that ultimately is unattainable except when depicted as art. Through Wick’s heartfelt, competitive fantasias and the magnificent big-screen allegory of the big-canvas David and Delacroix paintings in The Louvre’s famous “Red Room,” Stahelski evoked Busby Berkeley and Akira Kurosawa, turning stunt work into art.

The Fall Guy is inexcusably lowbrow, yet Leitch’s idea of entertainment is also crass; it copies the hectic sensationalism of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent but is less impressive than either.