This movie is not a “love letter to stunt performers”

This movie is not a ‘love letter to stunt performers,’ and I wish people would stop repeating that. Yes, I’m well aware that the director is a former stunt performer and part-owner of the 87Eleven stunt team; however, that doesn’t make it a good movie, nor a love letter to the stunt community.

It’s a romantic-screwball-comedy with some action scenes thrown in, which is not a problem in and of itself. There are plenty of good romantic and screwball comedies. This isn’t one of them.

This script was insultingly bad with really stupid writing; I don’t think I laughed once. There was just nothing funny about any of it. Also, when the main character is invulnerable it’s impossible to have stakes or care about what’s happening.

20 min and I had this exact thought, “This is worse than Hobbes & Shaw!” and that’s when it hit me; I checked IMdB, and surprise, surprise, it’s the same shit writer.

So, was it all bad?

No.

Ryan Gosling, who I’m not even a fan of, is great with what he was given to work with, and the movie would have been worse without him. Blunt, Waddingham, and ATJ all did well enough with the cartoonish characters they were given.

There were some industry criticisms worked into the dialogue that I appreciated, but they were nowhere near clever enough.

Also, a few of the fight scenes were well done, but not enough for a movie that was supposed to be about stunt performers. The nightclub fight scene was probably the highlight of the film for me; I thought that it was fairly creative.

Other than that, this was a big piece of 💩.

4.5/10


Also, what happened to ATJ's girlfriend? She was clearly complicit in the crime, yet she disappears from the film after the prop-katana fight and then reappears in the final scene at the Comic-Con screening of the reshot ‘Metal-Storm’ with Jason Momoa. Is this intended as an industry criticism of people looking the other way? If so, it needed to be made clearer. This would be an example of the insultingly stupid writing I mentioned earlier.