Johnny Oleksinski

Movies

By Johnny Oleksinski

A good stunt double makes us believe, completely, that our favorite movie stars are really putting their lives at risk onscreen for our entertainment.

It’s a humbling job. Do it well and you disappear.

The core problem facing the rather annoying new movie “The Fall Guy” — starring Ryan Gosling as a professional daredevil — is that we can’t believe.

Never for a second does the viewer buy that goofy Gosling is an in-demand stunt person who sets aside his ego for the betterment of a project. 

The actor can’t help but behave like an A-List Ken doll — a self-satisfied, mugging quality that’s made his cutesy performances more and more grating to experience. 

I don’t know what happened to the real, connected, personable actor from “The Notebook,” but now we’re stuck with Beavis. 

And here, where he’s supposed to be a modestly paid tradesman, Gosling struts around like any other Hollywood hero. So the main gag — a background player being thrust into a real-life action movie — instantly goes out the window.

Or, in this case, into Sydney Harbor.

“The Fall Guy” is loosely based on the 1980s TV series. Never a good sign.

Gosling plays Colt Seavers (the Lee Majors role), the cocky stunt double of a big-time actor named Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, possibly the new James Bond). 

After being sidelined for years by an injury, Colt finally gets back in the game when a loudmouth producer named Gail (Hannah Waddingham) asks him to fly from LA to Australia to help on a science-fiction movie called “Metalstorm.” 

He only takes the job because his former flame, Jody (Emily Blunt) is directing it.

Waddingham’s performance on “Ted Lasso” is subtle next to her schmacting here. And if Blunt is a first-time director who climbed her way up through the ranks doing smaller production jobs, then I’m Lebron James. 

Arriving down under, Colt learns that Gail had an ulterior motive — Tom is MIA, and she needs him to track the star down and bring him back to set to finish the movie.

From then on, whatever attempts “The Fall Guy” made to satirize Hollywood evaporate and the movie transforms into the latest rip off of “The Hangover.” 

He moves from spot to spot, picking up clues as to Tom’s location. Your cat could write this movie.

Colt gets into a sword fight with a woman at Tom’s apartment. He brawls with drinkers at a nightclub. There are car and boat chases and a dog that only understands French. Mon dieu!

Too bad, because there is some fun to be had on the kooky “Metalstorm” set in director Drew Leitch’s film. Sandy and orange, the movie looks like it’s trying to be “Dune” while actually landing more on “Battlefield Earth” territory. 

Extras in silly alien costumes shoot the breeze. Colt is set on fire over and over again, so Jody can get revenge on him. And Taylor-Johnson does a solid job of embodying a diva celeb. That’s all funny.

I’d rather this had been a send-up of movie-making along the lines of “Tropic Thunder” than a series of forgettable fights and carbon-copy underworld entanglements.

There’s a twist toward the end involving Waddingham’s character that’s too crazy for its own good. It has to do with the title, and it’s not as clever as it thinks it is.

The script by Drew Pearce also loses sight of the romance between Gosling and Blunt’s characters.

When you have the beloved stars of #Barbenheimer on the poster, you don’t need all the straight-to-streaming fight scenes.