Tag Archives: Ryan Gosling

The stunt man becomes the star as Ryan Gosling becomes THE FALL GUY

03 Friday May 2024

Posted by in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

With The Fall Guy, Ryan Gosling steps from the high of Barbie for another high. This one won’t get him another Oscar nomination – it’s more of an amuse-bouche rather than a full meal – but it’s fun if overlong. Stuntman-turned-director David Leitch’s valentine to his former profession leans into Gosling’s charm and comic chops to deliver an amiable blend of rock’-em-sock-‘em action, comedy, and romance.

The film credits its inspiration to Glen A. Larson, creator of the Lee Majors-starring 1980s series of the same name, but in that show, the stunt man spent his off hours as a bounty hunter. There is none of that in Drew Pearce’s screenplay. Instead, Colt Seavers (Gosling) is simply one of the best at his profession and has become the go-to stunt double for superstar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Or he was, anyway, until a horrific accident on one of Ryder’s sets sends Seaver into a tailspin, causing him to step away not just from his job but also from the woman he loves, camera operator and wannabe director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt).

Jody’s big break directing a Ryder film is what pulls Colt back when producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) insists Ryder and Jody both want him and, in fact, need him. So, he joins the location in Sydney, only to discover Gail lied – particularly about Jody wanting him anywhere around her after he so abruptly severed their relationship. Not that Colt has much time to consider this since he soon finds himself chased by bad guys and wanted for murder. What’s a stuntman to do but apply his talents to his new role as wanted man?

Gosling and Blunt are beguiling, Taylor-Johnson’s negative space of a personality works well in the context of a raging egomaniacal movie star – are they seriously considering this guy for Bond? – and Waddingham, Winston Duke as stunt coordinator Dan Tucker, and Stephanie Hsu as a striver wangling her way to a producer credit add invaluable support. But, honestly, the actors and the rickety plot are mere window dressing for the real stars of this production: the stunts and their performers.

The action rarely stops for plot as every scene is a set up for stunts. Some of them are part of Jody’s movie, a space alien/cowboy mishmash that looks truly awful but offers a canvas for stunts as small as setting someone on fire to big set pieces involving cars and helicopters. These scenes are a peek behind the curtain that give the audience a look at the mechanics of what stunt people do. Then there are the others in which Colt finds himself fighting for his life in a variety of dire situations, capped off by an homage to Miami Vice that is worth the price of a movie ticket all by itself.

This is not the first time Ryan Gosling has played a stunt man. He was a movie stunt driver who moonlighted as a getaway driver in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and a carnival motorcycle stunt performer in Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines. But The Fall Guy has far more in common with another stuntman-turned-director’s work, Hal Needham’s raucous comedy Hooper, than it does with either of those dramas. Maybe it’s not as silly but it is still essentially a diversion. The phrase “escapist entertainment” applies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the mayhem. —Pam Grady

Shane Black mines pulp comic gold in THE NICE GUYS

20 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

It’s magic! Guns blaze. They fire and fire and fire, never running out of bullets and with the gunmen never having to stop to reload. Writer/director Shane Black clearly remembers his ‘70s TV when that kind of fantasy gunplay was the standard and it’s just one of the delicious details in his delirious slapstick crime comedy “The Nice Guys.” In revisiting the pulp comic thriller territory of his own Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in this 1977-set movie that marries an Inherent Vice meets Freebie and the Bean vibe, employs a plot so convoluted as to be Chandlerian and casts a droll dream team in stars Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, Black comes up aces.

The Hollywood sign is in tatters, the introductory notes of The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” plays but just up to the point where the vocals would kick in, and a little boy grabs a nudie magazine from beneath his sleeping parents’ bed. Even before he has introduced any element of his plot, with these opening frames, Black sets the stage for the complicated situation that greets morose private eye Holland March (Gosling) and bull-in-a-china-shop enforcer-for-hire Jackson Healy (Crowe). The two meet not-cute when the young woman who has hired Healy to protect her from men who are stalking her discovers March has been looking for her and doesn’t bother to wait to find out why the detective is on her trail before attempting to throttle him. It’s only when they get down to comparing notes that they realize they are after the same thing and join forces.

The plot expands to pull in determined environmentalists, the seedy porn world, the auto industry, a Justice Department lawyer (Kim Basinger) with a murky agenda, and an ironically named hit man (Matt Bomer), but the story is only an excuse to put Crowe and Gosling through their paces. Crowe, who is beginning to look like his Gladiator costar Oliver Reed in middle age and who clearly relishes playing the tough guy, has his best role in years as a big palooka whose first instinct is always to hit something. Gosling as the sad sack March, an alcoholic widower and guilty father to 13-year-old daughter Holly (Angourie Rice, excellent), is pure genius both in his wry line readings and his gonzo physical comedy. Tis is a man who knows how to make the most of a pratfall.

Every detail in The Nice Guys is right, from the largely cheesy soundtrack (America! Andrew Gold! A slightly anachronistic “Pina Colada Song”) to an auto show climax that will make gearheads salivate to the casting of Rice, who recalls, in her intelligence and precocious maturity, the young Jodie Foster. Holly keeps inserting herself into the case in a way that would make today’s helicopter parents blanch, but is just perfect in recreating an era in which every kid was a free-range kid.

Black times every joke, every fight, and every set piece perfectly. Not all of it makes sense and probably isn’t supposed to as the filmmaker concentrates on evoking an era, mood, comic bits, and above all the relationship between his two disparate heroes. He delivers the goods and so do Crowe and Gosling. They aren’t just Nice Guys; they are pure comedy gold. –Pam Grady

GANGSTER SQUAD: Style and Spatter

11 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

GANGSTER SQUADGangster Squad gets points for style. It looks great in its depiction of postwar Los Angeles as a sleek, glamorous snake pit of crime and sin, never more so than when the camera lingers on Ryan Gosling’s Jerry Wooters, a cheerfully cynical, impeccably tailored lounge lizard of a police detective, a man who spends his off hours soaking up nightclub ambiance. Too bad that more thought went into costume design, art direction and recreating landmarks of the era than into Will Beall’s shallow and often ludicrous adaptation of Paul Lieberman’s “Tales from the Gangster Squad,” a 2008 Los Angeles Times true-crime series.

At least Gangster Squad gets the players’ names right, but very little else, as it reduces an irresistible saga of crime and punishment to blood-spattered fantasy. By this film’s reckoning, World War II combat veterans have returned so damaged by their experience that – whether cop or criminal – they are good for little else than killing people (it is Josh Brolin as Gangster Squad head Sgt. John O’Mara who puts forth that absurd theory), corruption in Los Angeles is but a brief 1940s phenomenon (oh really?), and gangster Mickey Cohen – the mob kingpin Sean Penn plays with such rage that he often appears to be close to stroking out – is so out of control that he is as apt to kill his own people as his enemies. It is also a movie that rewrites history purely to amp up the level of brutality.

Working with a property set in a time period during which film noir flowered, an era that novelist James Ellroy has claimed as his own, director Ruben Fleischer has a strong grasp of the period. Again, this is a movie that looks good. Perhaps he hoped that with enough outsized violence and a stellar enough cast – that in addition to Gosling, Brolin and Penn, includes Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick, Giovanni Ribisi, and Anthony Mackie – he could muscle through the deficiencies in the script. No dice. Like so many of the movie’s characters and nameless extras, Gangster Squad is dead on arrival, the victim of ludicrous plotting, rice-paper-thin characters and often pointless bloodshed.

If you must get your Mickey Cohen fix – and why not? The real guy was a fascinating character – skip Gangster Squad. Instead, watch L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson’s seductive 1997 Ellroy adaptation that casts Paul Guilfoyle as the notorious mobster or Barry Levinson’s stylish, James Toback-penned 1991 crime drama Bugsy in which Harvey Keitel steps into Cohen’s shoes in a bravura, Oscar-nominated performance. Or rent The Racket, a 1951 noir starring Robert Mitchum as a kind of one-man gangster squad, one of the few honest cops on a corrupt force, who squares off against mob boss Robert Ryan, a psychopath in the same mold as Penn’s Cohen (albeit one who appears to have a better handle on his blood pressure). Skipping Gangster Squad does mean missing Gosling swanning about in his exquisite threads (he does wear clothes well), but it also means missing an empty exercise in cutthroat style. – Pam Grady