My Cultural Diet

I’ve long believed that stuntmen and stuntwomen deserve more recognition than they receive. (Are you listening yet, Oscars?) For that reason alone, I was looking forward to The Fall Guy, a remake of the ’80s TV series starring Lee Majors. Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is a disgraced stuntman who’s given a chance to redeem himself — and possibly reunite with his girlfriend Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), now a fledgling director — when he’s tasked with tracking down action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Things, of course, go horribly awry. Given that it’s basically a movie about moviemaking, The Fall Guy is filled with cinematic references — which are humorous until they get heavy-handed and “meta.” (Winston Duke’s “Daniel Day-Lewis” war cry did make me chuckle, though.) The film is a fun bit of summer box office fluff, but I wish it had played things a bit more straight instead of constantly winking at the audience. In the end, The Fall Guy tries too hard to be clever, to its detriment.

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