The Stuntman – Read the film review with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt

In the first half hour of The Stuntman, when the voice-over narration starts to get very reflective, you can already feel that the film is going to adopt a noir recipe. In this case, the narrator character of Ryan Gosling perhaps he is too worried about his intrusive thoughts (and it is no coincidence that a character at one point accuses him of talking too much about himself) to realize that he is actually heading towards falling into a trap typical of the genre.

Both the search for truth and the trauma of the past that demands to be redeemed are the two basic situations in noir that The Stuntman recurs, in this story about a Hollywood professional who gets a second chance to prove his worth as a stuntman and his love for a debutant director (Emily Blunt). While we follow the filming of this debut, the stuntman comes across a police mystery involving the star he replaces on the scene (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson).

Adhering to these rules is a convenience that the roadmap Drew Pearce embraces very easily, because today noir – a genre that over the years of neonoir has become increasingly accustomed to talking about the behind-the-scenes of Hollywood – naturally leans towards the ironic, the literal and the self-conscious. Was this choice inevitable? Maybe so, because Ryan Gosling has played roles in films that were ironic versions (Two Nice Guys) and non-ironic (Drive) by the same stunt detective that he now revisits.

Does playing the same character repeatedly require you to do it ironically? It’s a pertinent question, but in your reflections The Stuntman has no interest in dwelling on it – not only because all pop production in American cinema is suitable for ironic consumption, but mainly because the director David Leitch He wants the literal and the self-conscious working in his favor. Former stuntman who rose to director in the first John Wick (2014), Leitch makes this feature film inspired by the 1980s TV series The Fall Guy to, through metalanguage, claim a brand for themselves. He is completing a decade as a director, it is legitimate to allow this vanity.

It is for the purpose of exalting the wronged class of stuntmen, therefore, of which Leitch and his company 87North present themselves as spokespeople, who follow this mix of action romantic comedy and noir pastiche involving Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. The sequence shot that opens the film is designed to indicate that the couple has chemistry, and the combustion scene gives the flavor of the battle of the sexes that the tense dynamic demands – and it seems to be enough. From there, The Stuntman he dedicates himself to coming up with far-fetched solutions to highlight the metanarrative and, like his protagonist, he starts to talk a lot about himself.

For a film that could be light like romantic comedies or uncomplicated like action films, The Stuntman weighs on self-reference. It’s clear that stunt doubles deserve recognition and their own category at the Oscars, but the literal and the utilitarian make everything more time-consuming in Leitch’s film – a director who does better in the vigorous simplicity of Atomic (2017) than in the textual refinement of Bullet train (2022). For his part, Drew Pearce’s scripts express themselves best when they find a filmmaker whose energy lies precisely in his vocation for pastiche, as Shane Black (who directed Iron Man 3 based on a screenplay by Pearce and later worked with Gosling on Two Nice Guys).

That the “genius” solution that Emily Blunt’s character finds to her dilemma in the third act is just a slow-motion fight scene – just like any action blockbuster that doesn’t know what to do with its third act – says a lot about the limitations of Pearce’s text and The Stuntman as a whole. Furthermore, even though great noir comedies continue to be made in Hollywood (like A Detective Case or of Confess, Fletch), we are plagued by this reality in which even a film with kisses and gunshots needs to be useful for people to recognize its value.