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

posted 6 months ago by VinceD (9805)
14 replies | jump to latest

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.

[–] TandyMan (11096) 6 months ago

I thought the movie was terribly shot. I actually thought while watching it that the stunts kind of take a back seat in a movie about stuntmen. But that whole behind the scenes stunt montage in the credits was mind blowing. None of that stuff translated though the lens. They should have actually shot the movie that way, more like a documentary. I think it would have had a lot more impact. Movie couldn't decide what it was trying to be.

[–] Alex (1503) 5 months ago

This!
Smth must have happened in the editing room cause holy shit.

[–] TandyMan (11096) 5 months ago

I started watching the tv show too, which features lots of stunts front and center. They simply missed the mark with how to present this movie.

[–] Alex (1503) 5 months ago

This is like a chick flick with some stunts peppered in. I blame the writer for his/her dogshit script and the director for allowing this bullshit + garbage editing.

[–] [deleted] 6 months ago

💯 agree. That Studio note ad campaign excuse is ridiculous.

[–] Kowalski (75523) 6 months ago

WELL SAID...I AGREE...I WISH I DIDN'T...I WANTED TO LIKE THE MOVIE...I DIG THE CAST AND THE TONE THEY WERE GOING FOR...BUT IT WAS MEH....I KEPT FINDING MYSELF REWRITING BITS OR BEING LEFT UNSATISFIED BY PAYOFFS...WHEN MY MIND HAS THAT KIND OF SPACE TO WANDER IT'S NEVER GOOD FOR THE MOVIE.

[–] fc31 (5365) 6 months ago

Yep, it basically says stunts are shit jobs, and can be replaced like that.

Colt clearly had very low self esteem, with about zero ambition, thinking he was just a cog in the machinery of movie making, willing to stay that way.

I think it is more of a love letter to the directors, they run the machines.

[–] lovepiss (41) 6 months ago

I agree.

'A love letter to..' makes my fucking skin crawl when I see it in reviews. It's in the same elitist twat dictionary as 'a visual tour de force'

[–] MoviesStillSuck (520) 5 months ago

I agree 10,000%. It’s perhaps the worst cliche in all of moviemaking right now. My skin is crawling just thinking about it.

[–] WhereIsRent (1080) 6 months ago

Agreed, the script was really bad. Gosling tries his best with it but the jokes fell flat for me a lot of the time, it was nowhere near as funny as Leitch’s last film Bullet Train or Gosling’s other comedy films The Nice Guy’s and Barbie.

Hobbs & Shaw wasn’t funny either, this writer’s style of comedy is so bland and forgettable.

[–] Alex (1503) 5 months ago

Bullet Train wasnt all that either. It overstayed it's welcome by about 20-30 minutes. Plus the whole copying Guy Ritchie style.

[–] emori (3661) 5 months ago

No. It IS love letter to stunt performers. And they had to create romantic-screwball-comedy. Because movie need a plot.
I was shocked when they showed at the end that basically every action scene was shot on location instead of made on computer.
I feel bad that script was so boring and movie flopped. I respect that they did all those scenes with real stuntmen

[–] letess (1513) 5 months ago

Maybe love letter is an annoying phrase. But this is definitely a well thought out acknowledgment to the specialized and unrecognized profession of stuntmen everywhere. Not as good as Bullet Train, but director Leitch is a stuntman and he incorporates the stuntmen he knows to do these difficult stunts that seem like nothing to us. And then he takes an 80s TV show - only because he probably had to pitch this thing to the producers and since we are only seeing remakes, prequels and sequels and bios - it gave him traction. And the reason for this is supposedly to get the “stuntmen” category recognized by the Oscars. And yet, ironically, if there were such a category, this movie would not be nominated for it. Because when you think of stunts - I automatically, think of Ghost Protocol 135th floor, The Spy Who Loved Me ski jump, Cliffhanger, True Lies. Or the surfer in Point Break who rode that 50 ft wave in at the end and got paid very little. But the dialogue, especially the romantic banter is horrible. Not so bad as Jack and Rose in Titanic but almost. When this movie finally gets to the dead guy in the tub is there a sense of purpose - yes, so this is a mystery. Why is this guy dead? And then you find out why. All with the backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Sydney Harbour. I don’t know about you, but I just want to see a movie that doesn’t deal with vampires, zombies, the end of the world, alternative states, prequels, sequels, or bios, and for me, families. I had a really enjoyable time watching this at the theater and everybody at the theater did too. And I laughed in this. Some parts. Didn’t you laugh at Aaron Taylor-Johnson doing Matthew McConaughey or when Gosling has a serious discussion with the cast who all looked like the Star Wars bar. It may not be the best, but it’s going in a better direction. I’d prefer seeing Ryan with Russell Crowe in that last great movie they did but I guess it wasn’t great enough.