The Fall Guy review: Despite Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s comic interplay, this jokey reboot falls short

After the rise of Ken and his show-stealing turn at the Oscars, Ryan Gosling’s stock could hardly be any higher at the minute. A glowing profile in the Guardian last week praised his feminist, metrosexual, enlightened masculinity and even claimed he’s changing the nature of celebrity.

Now the Gos is starring in a big-budget reboot of 1980s TV show The Fall Guy. It has Emily Blunt and Aaron Taylor-Johnson — it can’t fail, can it? It can if it’s badly written.

Full marks, though, to Mr Gosling’s commitment to the role of cheesy stuntman Colt Seavers, who here becomes the Hamlet of car wrecks, a tragic figure with impeccable abs.

In a busy opening sequence, Colt walks onto a bustling film set while telling us how he and his stunt brethren are the hidden heroes of action movies, putting their necks on the line to make pampered stars look good.

Few are more pampered than Tom Ryder (Taylor-Johnson), a grandiose and self-regarding A-list idiot who insists Colt repeat a dangerous high-wire drop sequence because the cameras caught a glimpse of the stuntman’s face.

The second time around, it goes horribly wrong: Colt breaks his back and spends long months in recovery. His career in ruins, he ends up parking cars at a taco joint, and bitterly regretting his failed relationship with camerawoman Jody Moreno (Ms Blunt).

She’s now in Australia directing her first movie, ‘Metalstorm’, and Colt is surprised to get a call from Jody’s producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) asking the stuntman to come back to work. Jody needs him, she says, to handle some particularly challenging stunts.

When Colt gets to Sydney, however, he finds that Jody never asked for him at all, and is not one bit pleased to see him. And Tom Ryder, meanwhile, has gone missing without a trace: if Colt can’t find him, Jody’s debut feature film will be ruined.

The original 1980s TV show starred Lee Majors as Seavers, a veteran movie stuntman who quietly bemoans his anonymity and moonlights as a bounty hunter to pay the bills. “I’m the unknown stuntman who makes Eastwood look so fine…”, the slightly bitter theme song told us, but ultimately Seavers was a noble, Gary Cooper-type American, who rescued all and sundry before wandering wryly into the sunset.

All of that is a bit sincere for this age of perma-irony, and so Ryan Gosling’s Colt must be both a hero and a twit, who acknowledges his emotional shortcomings and macho sins while taking on the villains and saving the day.

If any modern star is capable of encompassing these contradictions it’s Gosling, and his comic interplay with Emily Blunt might have worked brilliantly if they’d been given anything interesting to say.

Blunt’s Jody is pitched as a modern, driven career woman who takes no nonsense from anyone. But she’s woefully underwritten and seems to exist only to be exasperated by Colt but also desperately in love with him. And when she takes him to task over the infuriating thumbs-up signal he always gives when he’s just fallen out of a plane, escaped a burning car or is being carted off by the medics on a gurney, you know she’s secretly as wild about Gosling as the rest of us.

Films like this one — big-budget action comedies aimed at grown-ups — are such an endangered species at this stage that one feels a bit mean for not liking it. And The Fall Guy’s makers have gone to great pains to let us know that all the stunts we see are real, not CGI. If only as much love and care had been devoted to the screenplay.

Because once Colt lands in Australia and Jody’s leading man goes missing, it all begins to feel like an episode of Scooby Doo.

Gosling has his moments, as indeed does his sidekick, Jean Claude, an attack dog that will only respond to commands made in French. But Hannah Waddingham overacts wildly, turning a plausible film producer into the Widow Twanky, and overall, The Fall Guy feels smug and self-satisfied. An opportunity missed.

In cinemas from Friday May 3

Rating: Two stars

The Idea of You (Prime Video, 116mins)

Inspired, we are told, by the romantic travails of Harry Styles, The Idea of You poses interesting questions about age and gender roles, and is suffused with low-key charm.

Forty-year-old single mother Solene (Anne Hathaway) has brought her teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) to the Coachella music festival when she gets caught up in a meet-and-greet with boyband ­August Moon. Their lead singer, Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine) takes a shine to Solene, and a week later turns up in her LA art gallery to ask her out.

Solene thinks all of this is preposterous — Hayes, after all, is 24. But when they spend an afternoon together, she realises she has feelings for him, and secretly joins him and the band on a European tour.

The hatred she inspires in online sinkholes once their relationship is revealed ought not to surprise Solene, and Michael Showalter’s film has much to say about the hypocritical standards applied to older women.

Reid Scott is the villain of the piece as Solene’s epically entitled ex-husband, but Hathaway is a wonderfully relaxed and soulful central presence here, and her chemistry with Galitzine is delightful.

On Prime Video now

Rating: Four stars

Unfrosted (Netflix, 93mins)

In his legendary sitcom, Jerry Seinfeld had a special shelf with 15 different boxes of cereal, and Unfrosted is a kind of love letter to the stuff.

Mr Seinfeld, who co-wrote and directed the film, dramatises and wildly exaggerates a 1960s battle between cereal rivals Kellogg’s and Post to invent a “fruit-filled heatable pastry” that would revolutionise the American breakfast. It would come to be known as the Pop Tart, but not before a gloves-off corporate pitch battle that comes to resemble the Cold War and even, at one point, involves actual Russians.

Seinfeld is Bob Cabana, the visionary Kellogg’s executive, who assembles a team of brilliant eccentrics to work on the new product, among them NASA scientist Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), who thinks big and tells it like it is.

Amy Schumer is Marjorie Post, their devious rival, Christian Slater a sinister milkman, and Hugh Grant gives us the latest in his fine line of ham actors as Thurl Ravenscroft, the man inside the Tony the Tiger suit. It all gets a bit broad towards the end, as too many half-cooked ideas are thrown at the wall. But it has its charms and is sometimes genuinely funny.

On Netflix from Friday May 3

Rating: Two stars