The Fall Guy Movie Trailer: Thoughts

I remember when I first heard about the plans for a The Fall Guy feature film I was dubious about the project--not only its chances of producing a movie people may actually like, but people even being interested enough to go and find out whether they like it or not by seeing it themselves. I have already discussed here why Hollywood has probably done well to draw back from its earlier obsession with turning old TV shows long off the air into major feature films--not least, how reruns of old TV shows are just not the pop cultural staple they used to be. There is, too, the fact that '80s nostalgia is ever less salable for having become so mined-out at this point (to say nothing of the remoteness of the '80s themselves for ever more of the population as the decade recedes further and further into the past), while The Fall Guy in particular seems a poor prospect given the obscurity into which it slipped pretty quickly, certainly as compared with Miami Vice, or The A-Team, the feature film versions of which of course did not deliver boffo b.o.. (After all, when was the last time you saw it on a classic TV channel, or streaming? Or even heard it mentioned anywhere?)

The trailer for the movie has not changed my mind about the film's chances, only confirmed them. The big-screen The Fall Guy is not an action movie, but an action-comedy whose feel seemed to me all too reminiscent of Seth Gordon's ill-conceived Baywatch, and just as likely to fail to grab new fans while annoying the old (what there are of them, anyway). Certainly Ryan Gosling makes an extremely different on-screen impression from Lee Majors. (I can't picture him playing one of Martin Caidin's Steven Austin-type ultra-competent, ultra-macho heroes, any more than I can picture Lee Majors playing "Kenough" from Barbie.) It also seems very unlikely that the particular charm that Heather Thomas (and Markie Post) brought to the series will have any analog here. And altogether the texture of everything comes across as very different, given that the movie's action-adventure spectacle looks like it will derive more from the movies in which the protagonist is a stunt man than his actual adventures in the real world; the associated saturation of the thing with the kind of Computer-Generated Imagery that was still just science fiction back in the 1980s; and the particular flavor of humor implied in Gosling's shoving his sunglasses up his nose with his middle finger as he looks at the trailer for a movie where his stunts made the actual star of that film look heroic, which feels very much more of our post-'90s indie film universe than the spirit which produced the lyrics to the show's theme song (which lingers in the memory even after so much else of the show slips away).

I expect, at best, a lackluster opening for the movie on the first weekend in May, when it kicks off the summer season of 2024--as unprepossessing as the season, and the year, look likely to be given what we know of them at present.

I know, I know--it is another grim prediction, and indeed yet another grim anticipation regarding the movies of 2024. But it seems to me nearly impossible to offer much of anything else these days unless you are one of the bought and paid for claqueurs and courtiers of the entertainment press (or gullible enough to believe what claqueurs and courtiers tgell you).

Fortunately for you, if you prefer what they have to offer, you will have no trouble whatsoever finding it elsewhere.