The Fall Guy (2024)

Having broken his back during an accident, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), stuntman to the insufferable star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), does recover bodily, but finds himself in lowest of spirits. During his recovery he has driven away his girlfriend, budding director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), and has decided to park cars for a living instead of jumping canyons in them.

However, Ryder’s manager and producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) lures Colt back to stunt work by the simple expediency of telling him Jody asked for him to work on her directorial debut Metal Storm, a SF epic about the power of love, violence and cheesy speeches, that does, alas, seem to lack Jared Syn. What the film also lacks is Tom Ryder, for he has gone missing – possible on a drug bender – which wouldn’t be atypical for the guy. Gail wants Colt to find him before anyone else notices he is gone (most people on set don’t). All the while, Jody is rather nonplussed to find her ex-boyfriend suddenly working on her movie – she certainly didn’t ask for that.

Soon, Colt will need all of his considerable stunt person superpowers to survive his surprisingly dangerous search for Ryder; in between being drugged, getting run over by cars, and so on, there’s also a bit of a possibility to restart the relationship with Jody he so efficiently sabotaged after his accident on a more equal footing.

Saying I went into David Leitch’s The Fall Guy with low expectations would be selling them rather high, even though I loved Leitch’s Bullet Train. The combination of modern high budget action comedy, a needless revival of a mildly beloved old IP (shudder), and Ryan Gosling (whose general unwillingness to express emotions via facial expression or body language simply isn’t my idea of acting except in very specific circumstances) did not promise a good time.

But here’s the thing: Gosling emotes! Well, that’s one of several things, as a matter of fact. Instead of the completely empty pap I expected, this is a lovely cross between two genres that only very seldom meet – the romantic comedy and the action comedy, and one where both genres are equally important to the film.

That Leitch does absurd action very well is no surprise; his expert sense of romantic timing very much is. But then, Drew Pearce’s script goes out of its way not to reproduce the way relationships are usually treated in action movies, nor does he fall into the trap of many a male-centric romcom where the protagonist’s girlfriend-keeping character change feels self-serving and dishonest. Colt Seavers isn’t just working out his bullshit, he’s also genuine about his feelings and going through that whole parallel action comedy plot at the same time; Blunt’s Jody is never just a prize but has some actual agency, as well as dreams and hopes that belong to her. Blunt’s also as fun in the Romcom stuff as she is in the more action oriented bits of the film. In fact, the way romcom and action comedy collide and change one another’s clichés is one of the most surprising elements here – much of the film can be read as meta commentary on the differences and parallels of genres that are typically female and male-coded, and suggests some things they might learn from each other.

The absurd action for its part is as expected: fun, fast, often very clever with the stupid jokes and very much centred on actual stunt work instead of CG, as is only right and proper when it comes to a film about a stuntman. The film’s also genuinely well plotted, with a central mystery that works and an eventual solution to our heroes’ problems that very consciously uses movie magic to come to a proper movie solution.

Because that’s what The Fall Guy is as well: a paean to genre films, the absurd things we are willing to love, the clichés we embrace and those we embrace while laughing about them, the things we want to believe in movies, the special moment when something preposterous and artificial touches one’s heart just as if it were the real thing, only better.

Godzilla (2014)

I was rather hopeful about this second Hollywood attempt to make a Godzilla movie given how much I enjoyed director Gareth Edwards’s fantastic Monsters. But then, Edwards wouldn’t have been the first director who had a hard time going from low budget cinema to mainstream blockbusters, and that’s before all the inevitable troubles of making a studio movie are taken into account.

Fortunately, this US Godzilla is at least as good as optimism could could convince one to hope for, doing very little wrong in the difficult job of making a blockbuster kaiju film. Because I am like that, let’s start off with the film’s downsides, namely the script’s – understandable – insistence on keeping its protagonist Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) close to nearly every central development in the plot, going through quite a few contrivances to get him there. I know, it’s meant to provide dramatic unity and give that part of the audience always in need of having somebody to “identify” with their due, but I honestly think you could have achieved the same goal with half a dozen characters taking on smaller individual roles in the tapestry of what’s going on; perhaps even characters of different gender and skin colour? It doesn’t exactly help that Taylor-Johnson seems to be another one of these extremely bland young male actors the last few years have brought up in Hollywood, all pretty indistinguishable from one another, serviceable actors, yet rather vacuous presences; which to me seems particularly ironic in a generation that has so many extremely talented actresses yet still too often finds little for them to do. Which neatly fits into the film’s next problem, namely that Godzilla has fuck all for Ford’s wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) to do.

Still, having said all this, it’s surprising how well Godzilla works in practice, its heavy emphasis on the human side of the story not feeling distracting – or as artificial and Hollywood-like – at all, and while I’m not really happy with concentrating all the humanity on one bland guy who just happens to be the son of the not-so crazy Bryan Cranston character, as well as a military bomb disarming expert, as well as the father of a family that just happens to live exactly in the monsters’ way, the film executes this problematic idea as good as humanly possible. Mostly, I think, because a lot of the reaction to the monsters we see from Brody (very much standing in for the way the film sees its monsters) is awe, a mixture of wonder and fear Edwards already managed to evoke – for much less money and on a more private level – quite wonderfully in Monsters. Awe seems to me the only proper feeling towards the sort of forces of Nature the monsters here are, accepting the beauty and the horror as different sides of the same coin.

I think it is this sense of awe in its treatment of its kaiju that grants this Godzilla its sense of gravitas, its characters witnessing occurrences they are barely able to comprehend, the attempts to resolve the situation through the rules and regulations that already don’t help in normal human existence (when in doubt, nuke it) bound to fail and possibly to make the situation worse. The film would be nearly Lovecraftian if you look at it from that angle, if not for the moments when the film insists – and that’s Hollywood to you – that human actions do matter, at least when it comes to inadvertently helping out Godzilla with a distraction. Of course, there’s a degree of irony in the fact that what’s a distraction to the film’s monsters is not done to distract them by the film’s characters, and that a desperate heroic deed by a human is only ever a short distraction for a monster/nature/whatever you want it to stand for.

Another thing Godzilla does that works out as a plus for it against what you’d expect (or well, against what I would have expected) is how coy it is about showing its monsters at work before the final grand – which it truly is - throw-down, the film only ever showing bits and pieces of what’s going on literally above characters’ heads, yet never looking away from the destruction caused, nor its aftermath. Edwards uses this technique not to deny his audience the big destruction set-pieces it came to see but rather to put the monster action in the right perspective, which is to say, put the audience in the perspective of ants staring at a mountain, an effect not even Shusuke Kaneko in his classic Gamera trilogy strove for quite this hard.

So, despite my misgivings, I found myself quite riveted by Godzilla, enjoying – if you can call it that – its moments of awe and carnage, appreciating its philosophical level (there’s also some obvious political allegory here, if you prefer that sort of thing), and ending up convinced this is not just a US Godzilla better than the last attempt but one that can see eye to eye with many of the better kaiju eiga.

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