#ryan goslin

THE FALL GUY (2024): Pointless sort-of remake of the early '80s TV show with Lee Majors and Heather Thomas (who cameo in a post-credits scene), starring Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a mild-mannered stuntman who's in love with camera operator and aspiring director Jody (Emily Blunt), only to ghost her and retire after suffering a back injury. He gets back into harness to work on Jody's feature debut, a sci-fi epic called METALSTORM (a pastiche of COWBOYS AND ALIENS and MAD MAX being filmed in Australia), and ends up framed for murdering another stuntman while trying to win Jody back.

Other than the name of the character and the Lee Majors theme song playing over the end credits, there's so little relationship with the TV show that you wonder why they bothered — on the show, Colt was a licensed bounty hunter as well as a stuntman, which isn't the case here, and as played by Lee Majors, was a self-deprecating but macho tough guy, which the Gosling character is not. My dim recollection of THE FALL GUY, which I haven't even thought about watching in many, many years, is that it was very far from great art, but the movie isn't even a send-up, more an unrelated story that someone figured might make a little extra money if it tossed in some half-hearted references to a dumb action show some Gen X viewers might remember watching as children, and of course filled the soundtrack with '80s rock hits (some of them not yet recorded when the show was originally on the air). You can see the commercial logic, but it's pretty depressing if you think about it too much.

The following FCs are reserved for 72 hours:

Elizabeth Olsen