The film industry is in a bit of a silly little existential crisis at the moment.

Some of you will say, hey, it's been in a crisis.

But before this, it felt as though they always had remakes, superhero films, sequels, etc.

to fall back on for success.

Look at 2019's Box Office, for example.

And for years, everyone kind of knew this wasn't a sustainable way of running the industry, but there wasn't really much we could do about it.

With the exception of films with awards potential that all get smushed and forgotten about because of an overcrowded awards season,

Hollywood just wasn't coming up with a lot of new, original films.

At least, films that were meant to draw a big crowd in the theater, rather than at home.

And then a number of things happened.

The pandemic, the strikes, superhero fatigue, more streaming services.

And now we're at a point where it doesn't matter if it's a superhero movie, a remake, or a sequel, you can't really count on anything to make its money back.

Maybe because they're putting a disgusting amount of money into some of these lousy ideas.

But the point is, nothing is a guaranteed hit anymore, besides Barbie.

The more I think about the success of Barbie, the happier it makes me.

Because Barbie is a comedy.

The Oscar campaign and discourse we've all moved on from will tell you it's more than that, which it is.

But at its core, Barbie was such a hit because it was simply fun.

It was bright, and pink, and pretty to look at, and had catchy songs, and was hilarious.

And the year before that, the biggest of the year that I didn't anticipate being the biggest of the year, was Top Gun Maverick, which was a hit because it was sincere, nostalgic, loud, and breathtaking.

Both films captured cinematic escapism at its finest.

Both were the fastest two hours I had felt in a movie theater in a while, a quality that's been proven to be something you need to earn.

It's not a matter of just throwing ideas at the wall, hoping your baby audience is entertained, and calling that escapism.

No, the earned escapism is the kind of stuff that becomes a hit, because it reminds people why they love movies.

That's where The Fall Guy comes in.

The way I've just described the two biggest theatrical hits of the last two years, you would think The Fall Guy would be a surefire smash.

Not only does it star Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who both dominated the box office last summer, but it's also a capital-C comedy, filled to the brim with jokes similar to Barbie, with breathtaking stunts that satisfy in all the ways you want them to, similar to Top Gun.

Even the runtime falls somewhere in between these other two films.

David Leitch even proved himself to be a pretty successful director with Bullet Train a few years ago.

More on that later.

And in some ways, it's nostalgic in being a blockbuster comedy that we haven't seen in a while, but self-aware in all the ways audiences need it to be these days.

It simply has all the pieces to be a hit.

And at the time of putting this video out, I don't know if the movie is gonna be a hit.

I can see a world where it flops.

I can also see a world where it becomes one of the biggest films of the year.

Unlike those other two films, I do not see this being a Best Picture nominee.

But minutes before this screening started, I saw a couple walk in with a newborn baby.

Clearly, the pull here was just too good for them to stay home and wait.

There's something in the air about this thing.

I guess what I'm saying is, I hope this film is a hit.

Not because I'm the biggest Fall Guy fan in the world, but because something this undeniably fun and worthy of success should be a hit.

And if it's not, I don't really know what a Hollywood blockbuster is supposed to look like anymore.

In a weird turn of events, The Fall Guy is an important movie.

And it's also a wonderful ode to stunt work.

Stunt work is admittedly not something I knew a ton about, but is a part of the industry I've always been fascinated by.

And thanks to this week's sponsor, Skillshare, I was able to learn a thing or two about it.

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The class breaks down everything from how to prep with a stunt coordinator to how to edit those stunts.

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I found it honestly fascinating and eye-opening.

I can't wait to one day put what I learned to the test.

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The Fall Guy tells the story of a stuntman named Colt Seavers and what happens when he returns to the industry after suffering a near-career-ending injury.

I have to say what we're all thinking.

Ryan Gosling is mostly why this movie works as well as it does.

Before it even came out, I'll be honest, I didn't think it looked that great.

The trailer for this made it seem like the most Ryan Reynolds movie ever that Ryan Reynolds was maybe supposed to be in, but instead we got Ryan Gosling.

And thank God for that.

I don't even hate Ryan Reynolds that much, but really, if you replaced Gosling with Reynolds and changed nothing else, had him say all the same lines with the same delivery, it would be significantly less enjoyable.

In a weird turn of events, Ryan Gosling has become one of our best comedic actors working today.

I don't know how this happened.

There were hints of it in The Nice Guys and La La Land, but this and Barbie proved he just has something about him that makes me laugh uncontrollably.

There are very few actors who could do something where I literally can't help but laugh, and that happened most of the time during this movie.

In general, once I warmed up to the film a bit,

I thought it really started to fly with the comedy.

Usually, I'm not a fan of a film milking one specific bit throughout the movie because if it didn't land the first time, it sure as shit not gonna land the 20th time.

Oh, God!

Ugh, sorry, I just, I got flashbacks to Loving Thunder.

But the Fall Guy has this running bit with a French dog that never got old.

Something about it tickled me.

Still tickles me.

I love it.

Emily Blunt, too.

So much funnier than I remember her being.

She takes the material so seriously and treats all the romantic aspects with such sincerity that it ends up being really funny in a way I definitely thought was intentional.

Hannah Waddingham, who I never thought was that good in Ted Lasso, just eats up her role in this one.

She's got such an expressive face that's always fun to watch.

Winston Duke plays the sidekick really well.

I thought he was hilarious.

And Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who I know I just made fun of in my latest What I Watched This Month video, he was fun, I have to admit.

I still don't think he'd be a good James Bond.

I still think there's something about him that I find really bland.

I don't know what it is.

I can't explain that.

I just, there's something about him that doesn't work for me.

But I can't deny that when he really lets loose near the end of the film,

I was enthralled.

I was into it.

If you can't tell, there are basically no performances in here that miss.

Some are better than others, for sure, but nobody is outright bad, which is a skill of Leitch that I've come to appreciate.

I think he's really good at balancing a large ensemble of colorful characters who each have their own quirks.

Quality aside, his films feel like their own little worlds, and I'd take that any day over something where it doesn't even feel like the actors are in the same room.

Basically, I love a film where you can tell being on set was probably a lot of fun.

That quality makes the silliness of it all feel pretty contagious, and everything about the film is better off because of it.

The Fall Guy is pitched as an action comedy, when really, it's a romantic comedy with some action that takes place on the set of a sci-fi movie.

Does it sound convoluted? Because it is.

But in a weird way, it kind of works.

The film, while hopping through genres, decides to stick with one to be the backdrop for it all, which is comedy.

And because of that, it manages to get away with its more cheesy romantic moments.

The central relationship here is interesting because it doesn't actually feel all that romantic in a traditional rom-com way, in the way anyone but you attempts.

But at the same time, Gosling and Blunt have so much more chemistry and work enough as a pair that the romance scenes are always interesting and fun to watch play out, unlike anyone but you.

What I find more interesting about this, though, is how much it differs from Leach's previous film,

Bullet Train, a film that just so happened to come out the same year as Top Gun Maverick.

That year, while I didn't hate Bullet Train, there was something overwhelmingly sour about it to me.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

I think because I had seen Maverick just months before and experienced what it felt like to watch a film take itself so seriously and to commit to the cheesiness so authentically,

I really just couldn't get myself to even pretend to care about a film that felt so annoyingly self-aware and smug about its action.

Trying so hard to be cool, while at the same time trying so hard to tell you it's not trying to be cool.

You know?

The Fall Guy, in that way, is the perfect follow-up, a film that could only exist after the release of both Maverick and Bullet Train.

The Fall Guy has all the typical Leach-isms, some of which don't work, like the convoluted second half and the half-baked protagonist, both things that I also saw in Bullet Train.

Honestly, while I'm at it, as fun as the action is conceptually,

I think Leach covers these scenes pretty lousily, and there are crucial moments that don't really come together in the edit.

But the moments that do work, like the comedy, the colorful set of characters, again, the setups for the action, that stuff really flies.

It's like it's taking the classic Hollywood cheese that everyone ate up in Maverick, the thing that makes movies so enjoyable, and it finds a way to make it funny without being smug about it.

This even has a parody at one point of a new movie that's pretty relevant right now, and it's a moment that shouldn't work at all, with a cameo that shouldn't work at all, but I laughed.

It- it did it for me.

And yeah, in some ways, I wish this would tone down the self-awareness a bit here and there.

The whole split-screen gag really did not work for me.

It felt like bad Edgar Wright.

If nothing else, I see this as one of the most ideal airplane movies I've come across in recent years.

And for all these reasons and more, I just hope this thing does well.

It- even if it's not a perfect movie by a long shot, it deserves so much success.

I would love this to be a huge summer movie.

And I think that's all I have to say.

Thanks for watching.

Please go buy a ticket for The Fall Guy and form your own opinion, and I'll see you in the next one.