Director: David Leitch

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Hannah Waddingham, Aaron Taylor Johnson

Ryan Gosling continues his mainstream trajectory with this fiddly and overlong, but frequently amusing comedy, based on the Lee Majors-starring teatime favourite.

We meet Gosling’s Colt Seavers as he is about to perform a vertiginous stunt on an action movie starring megastar Tom Ryder (Johnson) who Seavers has been doubling up for the last six years. The stunt goes wrong however, leaving Seavers seriously injured. He quits his job and walks out on his camera operator girlfriend, Jody (Blunt).

Eighteen months later, Seavers is making ends meet working as a valet at Mexican restaurant where he tries to avoid being spotted and derided.

Out of the blue, he receives a call from Ryder’s producer, the luvvieish Gail Meyer (Waddington) who tells Seavers that that his ex Jody is directing her first picture, a sci-fi epic called ‘Metalstorm’ in Australia, starring Tom Ryder, and that Jody has insisted Colt returns to his job as Tom’s regular stuntman.

On arriving in Australia, it emerges that Jody did not ask for him and that Gail has actually brought Colt over to locate Tom who has disappeared during some business with drugs, before the film is cancelled.

The plot toggles between Colt’s attempts to locate Tom with his will they-won’t-they romance with Jody, the latter often played out in full view of the crowded film set.

It coasts along amiably enough on mild chuckles, mostly due to a winningly low-key performance from Gosling, playing another vulnerable action man after his scene-stealing turn as Ken in ‘Barbie’, and he and Blunt are an appealing enough couple, even if their extended courtship is frustratingly coy.

Director Leitch, who helmed the first John Wick film and ‘Atomic Blonde’, ensures that the action sequence are amusingly bombastic and crunchy, and in a nicely knowing touch, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House feature prominently in all the chase sequences no matter how extended.

The meta touches can be a little tiresome: when Seavers explains to a villain in the third act that the explanation of his plan is overwrought and may lose the audience’s attention, that doesn’t make it less so. And no comedy should exceed two hours really.

The Fall Guy is out now.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm