Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy

THE FALL GUY
Directed by David Leitch
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆

THE Fall Guy uses distraction techniques to cover up a plot so silly Roger Hargreaves would have binned it if it were a Mr Men story.

Every scene seeks a visual or verbal gag, and something gets blown up. It’s all the better for it.

Top Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) breaks his back on set and instead of allowing Jody (Emily Blunt), the girlfriend he is crazy about, to nurse him back to health, he decides it’s best to simply disappear.

This unbelievable concept – your fella is in a coma but manages to somehow ban you from his life – sets up a heartache element.

Then we have a plot involving Colt’s leading man, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a wayward star muddled up with drugs, murder and violent mayhem.

Colt is brought out of retire­ment, apparently to save his lost-love’s first outing in the director’s chair – but there’s something fishy about his employment.

The original Fall Guy was an all-action good old boys-type tale. Colt was forged from the same material as Magnum PI, The Dukes of Hazzard and The A Team – popular TV series imported from America in the 1970s and 80s.

This film finds plenty of material for jokes and japes and, as the TV series did, mines Colt’s job to give us car chases, explosions, leaps from heights and hand-to-hand combat.

Director David Leitch lays it on thick – film producer Gail Mayer (Hannah Waddington) is a vicious satire.

Blunt and Gosling play it for all they’ve got. Their exuberance raises the film higher than perhaps it deserves.

Jokes litter each scene, from verbal repartee to visual laughs: Blunt dressed as an alien while pouring out her romantic pains is grand, and plenty of mileage comes from a lovelorn director being in control of the stunt man who broke her heart.

At the end we are given a run through outtakes, as any good 1970s action film was wont to do, and as they run the original theme song from the show plays out…or does it?

The country-style tune had a line that said: “I didn’t spend much time in school, but I’ve taught ladies plenty…” a lyric mysteriously missing this time out. And that sums up what’s fun – we have lost the macho posturing and instead have a rather good natured action comedy. It’s quite big, but not clever and all the better for it.