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The Fall Guy review: Stuntman Ryan Gosling steals the show... and his screen chemistry with Emily Blunt is the real deal, writes BRIAN VINER

As a celebration of stunts and those who fearlessly perform them, The Fall Guy can't be faulted though it's never quite up there with the Mission: Impossible movies.

The equivalent here of Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth in Tarantino's 2019 barnstormer is Gosling's Colt Seavers, the best 'fall guy' in the business, who risks life and limb for the greater glory of a narcissistic star, Tom Ryder ( Aaron Taylor-Johnson). As it happens, the screenplay is by Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation writer Drew Pearce, and it has been rightly criticised for a bad-taste joke about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, one of numerous references to real-life stars and their movies (Harrison Ford, The Fugitive, Jason Bourne, Miami Vice, Thelma & Louise, even Notting Hill, Love Actually and Pretty Woman) that are meant to be part of the fun, pumping up the sense of an industry chuckling at itself. Some of those points land, and as I say, Hathaway and Galitzine (whose beauty as the young Duke of Buckingham also had King James I lusting after him in the TV mini-series Mary & George) have enough chemistry to make their steamy relationship credible, even as the clichés clank around them, bumping into the improbabilities.

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