The Fall Guy review

However, if you have something to look forward to – say the appearance of an all-new movie star – it’s easy to put up with the filler around it.

And that’s basically what The Fall Guy, a movie inside a movie starring Hollywood cool guy Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a stuntman seeking redemption, boils down to. It’s odd because scratch the surface and The Fall Guy is a glowing tribute to the stuntpeople of the world that other stuntpeople will likely love, but to us common folk it’s around two hours of moving from one butt cheek to the other to try and get comfortable because the movie will never make you feel that way.

Seavers decides to come back from the embarrassment of a job gone horribly wrong – it didn’t end with a thumbs-up, which apparently is stunt industry code for “yeah, I won’t need an immobilisation stretcher to hobble away from this one” – to double for one more movie and hopefully reunite with Jody Moreno, played by Emily Blunt, a former flame who has become a first-time movie director.

Seavers's redemption-defining job is as a stunt double for Tom Ryder, an actor played by real-life actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, with whom he’s worked before. This time it is filming an alien-stuffed sci-fi movie called Metalstorm, with production based in – you guessed it – iconic Sydney, or more specifically, the immediate area around inner Sydney’s CBD, the Sydney Opera House, the Harbour Bridge (which he slid across in a skip bin) and nearby Kernell Beach.

In terms of comedy, well, apart from a few induced chuckles it’s thin on the ground. As for action? That’s slow to arrive, and then tedious to take in. That is, apart from a single moment late in the movie that anyone who owns a boat will appreciate.

At one stage Seavers has to escape from bad guys trying to frame him for a murder he did not commit. They happen to have him holed up on Ghost 2, a 146-metre Gulf Craft superyacht that in the real world operates as a charter vessel and calls Sydney its home waters.

Following the guidelines spelt out in the Hollywood Movies for Dummies self-help manual, Seavers leaps onto a nearby boat that happens to be an unmarked Formosa SRT 595 centre console, although minus its traditional hardtop. Complicating things is the fact that Seavers has his hands cuffed in zip-ties behind his back.

What follows is the most engaging few minutes of what turns out to be a fairly mediocre serve of action movie. The Formosa rips at full throttle around Sydney Harbour while the bad guys spray it with lead. It slows for a monologue, speeds back up, leaps a dock and catches fire, and eventually crashes into a handy anchored-up floating refuelling station with the attendant huge Hollywood fireball from which our hero escapes, adding another 40 minutes or so to the movie.

Seavers escapes because somehow he has found a serrated edge on the Formosa’s seat and freed his hands, allowing him to leap from the boat before the moment of fiery impact, swim ashore, do a lot more character-defining monologue, have a crack at one last major stunt, and then roll the credits showing montages of the stunts performed for the movie by actual stuntpeople.

Okay, so The Fall Guy admittedly does have one other good stunt, although it is somewhat spoiled by learning the inside trick used to make all the movie magic happen. Rolling a car nine times is an achievement, although James Bond and that Aston Martin DBS in Casino Royale, which rolled fewer times, arguably did it much better.

Anyway, back to the Formosa boats used in the movie. Producers approached Sydney-based Good Times Marine asking if it could build them a couple of boats that could perform a jump stunt.

Good Times Marine did, delivering boats featuring a bolted-on slave helm built into the bow so that a stunt driver could steer it, leaving the actor free to focus on playing up to the camera. In scenes where it could be seen, the slave helm was removed.

Boats rarely appear in movies, and even then more as a cameo than a main character. The James Bond franchise has had the odd crack, the remake of The Italian Job dabbled in it, Robert Redford was insufferable in All is Lost, and Dead Calm slammed the door shut on the dream of cruising the world for a whole generation of boaters who are probably still in therapy.

The biggest disappointment, though, is that The Fall Guy was shaped by the same director who delivered us Bullet Train, the Quinten Tarantino-Guy Richie-styled black comedy mash-up that was a thoroughly engaging watch from start to finish.

If it wasn’t for the starring role of the Formosa SRT 595 centre console, this movie would have been little more than a boat anchor.