Movie Reviews
Movie Review | Ryan Gosling shines in sloppy slice of summer fun
Surely, Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir has had easier gigs.
Watching “The Fall Guy” — the big-screen take on the 1980s TV fave about a Hollywood stuntman who worked on the side as a bounty hunter that this week kicks off the summer movie season — you can’t help but think of its editor.
“The Fall Guy” is many things: an homage to the show; a romance; a vehicle for stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt; a large-scale action flick; and a love letter to stunt performers — those who do the dangerous work or, as the movie suggests early on, get to do “the cool stuff.”
It is big, and it is messy, but Ronaldsdóttir has helped mold it into something that, while lumpy and misshapen, is more entertaining than not.
This isn’t her first cinematic rodeo with director David Leitch, having collaborated with him on hit movies including such winners as 2017’s “Atomic Blonde” and 2018’s “Deadpool 2,” so she surely knew what she was signing up for.
It is, of course, entirely fitting that Leitch sat in the director’s chair for “The Fall Guy,” as he once was a stuntman himself. Famously, he was Brad Pitt’s stunt double on 1999’s “Fight Club.”
Here, the stuntman is Gosling’s Colt Seaver, the movie borrowing the name of Lee Majors’ hero from the TV series, which ran from 1981 to ’86.
When we meet Colt, he’s at the top of his game, specializing in being the stunt double for Hollywood megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Leitch’s “Bullet Train”). On the set of a big movie — Leitch and another frequent collaborator, director of photography Jonathan Sela, appear to take great pleasure in showing off the scale of such a shoot with a couple of elaborate shots — Colt is about to perform a huge fall.
On the way up to his starting point, he flirts via walkie-talkie with camera operator Jody Moreno (Blunt), the two talking about how, after the movie wraps, they could grab a couple of swimsuits — or, as a Brit such as herself would say, “swimming costumes” — hit a beach somewhere and enjoy a few margaritas, as well as the bad decisions to which they lead.
The fall goes badly.
Eighteen months later, Colt, perhaps more psychologically damaged than physically so, is out of the stunt game, making a living by parking cars for a Mexican restaurant. And, having long ago pushed away a caring Jody, he is a walking pile of regret.
When old producer friend Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham of “Ted Lasso”) calls, asking him to be a last-minute fill-in on a set in Sydney, Australia, he declines. She then tells him it’s for Jody’s directorial debut and that his old flame requested him.
He says he’ll need an aisle seat.
Upon arriving at the shoot and set to do a car stunt known as a cannon roll, he complains about the sand on which he’ll be driving on — it’s, um, not dense enough — to another old pal, stunt coordinator Dan Tucker (Winston Duke of “Black Panther”), who coaxes him into the car.
The stunt goes well, save for Colt destroying a camera tracking his car, but Jody is shocked to learn he is behind the wheel. She did NOT, in fact, request him.
Unable to kick him off the project, she instead sets him on fire repeatedly for one scene. Between these hot takes, her frustration via bullhorn over what happened in their relationship under the thinly veiled guise of talking about the lead characters in her epic science-fiction romance flick, “Metalstorm.’
At the end of the day, Colt gets into a truck, cranks a Taylor Swift song, thinks about their time together and cries — at least until Jody catches him. They talk, and while it’s clear feelings still exist between them, they agree to keep things very “profesh.”
Colt soon has bigger problems than Jody, as Gail has secretly recruited him to find the movie’s missing star, the aforementioned Tom Ryder. She convinces Colt that to save Jodie’s movie, the cops must be kept out of it, and he agrees to take on the task.
From here, “The Fall Guy” keeps things really loose, Leitch and writer Drew Pearce (“Iron Man 3,” Leitch’s “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw”) prioritizing action and gags over clear storytelling. (Hey, it’s now summer at the movies — what did you expect?)
As Colt works to uncover the mystery of Tom’s disappearance, Gosling does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep “The Fall Guy” from falling apart. He brings some leftover “Ken”-ergy from the cultural event that was last year’s “Barbie,” for which he earned a well-deserved nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He nails every important line read with great Kenfidence, er, confidence.
One of the movie’s issues is that Jody becomes a glorified background player, not the best use of the talents of Blunt, a four-time Oscar nominee including for her work in the other half 2023’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, “Oppenheimer.” “The Fall Guy” would have benefited from a setup that gave more time with its leads together. (One of the movie’s many meta moments has them talking via split-screen as Jody talks about its potential use in her movie, Leitch deciding to educate us on that filmmaking choice and others.)
So, OK, “The Fall Guy” leaves you wanting a bit more, but it succeeds as a two-hour excuse to shove buttery popcorn into your mouth.
And those hoping for a nod to the show beyond the initial offering of closing credits, which feature the “Unknown Stuntman” theme song from the show, should stick around for an extra treat.
Yes, “The Fall Guy” makes a bit of a mess of things, but it sure has fun doing it.
“The Fall Guy” is rated PG-13 for action and violence, drug content and some strong language. Runtime: 2 hours, 6 minutes.
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s June 6, 1986, and we’re off to see Invaders from Mars, Raw Deal, and SpaceCamp.
Invaders from Mars
While everyone complains about how there are no original ideas in today’s films, welcome to the same issue in 1986.
12-year-old David Gardner dreams of space, and after staying up to watch a meteor shower, he sees what he believes is a UFO landing over the hill behind his house. The next morning his dad goes to investigate, but comes back not acting like himself. It seems the Martians have come to town and they’re going to start taking over the world by controlling one person at a time. With the help of his teacher, David starts to fight back and hopefully drive the Martians off the planet.
Other than some very goofy looking designs for the Martians, the film was a bit of fun, I felt. It certainly didn’t break any new ground, but I also definitely didn’t hate it. Throw it on for a mindless watch.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
Raw Deal
Even for a Schwarzenegger movie, this one was pretty bad.
Mark Kaminski (Schwarzenegger), was thrown out of the FBI on trumped up charges, but when his old boss, FBI Agent Harry Shannon, (Darren McGavin) finds his son killed while protecting a mafia informant, there’s only one man he trusts. Kaminski goes undercover in the mafia and tries to bring it down from the inside, ending up in a lengthy shootout with all of the members of two different mafia families.
I’m not sure how a movie with such a basic plot can be this boring, but it somehow succeeds. Not once was I engaged with the story. The only saving grace was I would watch McGavin in anything.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
SpaceCamp
Apparently, we’re all going to try to forget this movie existed.
When a group of teens attends Space Camp, they find themselves in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sit inside a Space Shuttle while it’s on the launch pad. Following an ‘accident’ orchestrated by a friendly robot, they end up having to launch with their adult supervisor and trying to find their way back home with limited resources.
As of this writing (June 6, 2026), this film is out of print physically, not streaming (legally), and is not available for digital purchase. YOU may be able to find it on a TUBE somewhere, however, if you look around.
Honestly, I kind of enjoyed it. It’s silly, but it pretty much knew what it was. Lets put it this way, I enjoyed it more than Raw Deal.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on June 6, 2026, with Invaders From Mars, Raw Deal, and SpaceCamp.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: June 5th, 2026 / 09:01 PM
CHUM movie poster | ©2026 IFC
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Alice Eve, Eric Michael Cole, Elle Haymond, Sarah Siadat, Johnny Gaffney, Lisa Yaro, Jim Klock, Vince Jolivette, Stephen Oliver
Writers: Jonathan Zuck and Joe Leone, story by Dick Grunert and Ryan R. Johnson and James Kondelik
Director: Jonathan Zuck
Distributor: IFC
Release Date: June 5, 2026
CHUM is the latest entry in the shark-obsessed-psycho-with-a-boat subgenre. It also meshes, perhaps coincidentally, with the 2024 sharks-but-no-psycho-ruin-a-Mediterranean-destination-wedding SOMETHING IN THE WATER.
Our narrator is Roy (Jim Klock) who, in the opening sequence, loses his wife to an enormous Great White in the sea off Malta. He begins by saying in voiceover, “You took her from me.” This is followed by a monologue about how much Roy loves his wife and includes the line, “Her scream lost in the roar of the sea.”
There isn’t anything particularly wrong with the line, except that we see the whole incident and then some – CHUM is very gore-friendly in all its shark attacks – and the woman is already underwater when the attack occurs. There’s no scream.
So, are we supposed to think that Roy’s imagination is playing tricks, or that director Jonathan Zuck and his co-writer Joe Leone, working from a story by Dick Grunert and Ryan R. Johnson and James Kondelik, aren’t paying close attention to what they’re doing?
Roy says he spent his life on the ocean, but “when you took her, I learned something new.”
Then we cut to a wedding banquet, where proud father Reginald (Stephen Oliver) is toasting his daughter the bride Tina (Alice Eve) and her groom Tom (Eric Michael Cole). Also in attendance are Tina’s irritable younger sister Sadie (Elle Haymond), bridesmaids Rachinda (Sarah Siadat) and Britney (Lisa Yaro), and Eric’s bro-ish best man Rick (Johnny Gaffney).
It’s a beautiful setting and a good-looking group, but it doesn’t take long for us to realize this union may not last. Tina and Tom have had a bitter fight about something that they seem unable to resolve. Tom winds up sleeping on the beach near the tide line, while Tina passes out on their hotel room bed in her wedding gown.
The nature of the dispute turns out to be one of the best aspects of CHUM. It’s real, it’s not the clichés that we too often get about onscreen marital disputes, and it’s wholly plausible that the timing is such that the couple haven’t had to confront it earlier.
Unaware of trouble in paradise, Rick has arranged a boat outing for the wedding party (sans Dad). Tina and Tom don’t want to go, but Rick guilts them into it – renting the boat for the day cost him a fortune.
The proprietor of The Tipsy Mermaid, Captain Mackey (Vince Jolivette), welcomes the six passengers aboard. He assures shark-averse Britney that there have never been attacks in these waters.
This again makes us wonder what’s happening on a meta level. We can see that The Tipsy Mermaid is out by the same coastline that we saw in the opening, so we know there’s been at least one shark attack here. Is Captain Mackey uninformed or lying?
A little later, we see that the microphone on the communications panel is severed. Our minds leap toward sabotage, but – spoiler alert – no, it’s just shoddy upkeep on The Tipsy Mermaid.
In reality (and easy to Google for Mackey or anyone in the group to who knew they’d be going out to sea that day), while they are rare, there have been shark attacks off Malta.
Furthermore, Tom, who is meant to be an expert on these matters, asserts that Great Whites are strangers to these waters, but are being driven north by climate change. It’s laudable that CHUM makes climate change part of the plot (and not just because of where the shark is), but again, there is a whole actual (albeit declining) subspecies of Great Whites in the Mediterranean.
We’re trying to figure out how all this will link up with Roy and what he’s learned, and we get to that, although perhaps not the way we expect, which is another CHUM asset.
Except for when the shark needs to interact with humans and/or vessels, the animal looks realistic, like footage of a genuine Great White. We also get a variety of fish in the underwater shots, which is a nice touch.
But there are the common-to-the-subgenre tropes of the shark looking way too big every time she breaches and eating way too much. Also, sharks do not growl.
One key aspect of this subgenre is how intrigued we are by the human villain. Here, the link between motivation and action doesn’t stack up well against that of comparable characters (e.g., Quint in JAWS or Bruce Tucker in DANGEROUS ANIMALS).
As these kinds of movies go, CHUM is moderately diverting, but it’s easy to see where it could have been better.
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It just isn’t sure what, exactly.
Photo: Giles Keyte/Amazon MGM Studios/Everett Collection
There’s a maybe half-hour stretch of Masters of the Universe that takes place in the real world, and I have no idea why. It isn’t something the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon felt compelled to do. The ’80s TV show, which was conceived of as an elaborate commercial for a Mattel action-figure line, was about the adventures of Adam, a brawny pageboy’d prince who transformed into the equally brawny hero of the title when he held his special sword aloft and intoned some magic words. Adam may have been half-Earthling on his mother’s side, but that was just a biographical footnote — he was an avowed citizen of Eternia, a planet where sword and sorcery elements exist alongside sci-fi ones like fighting robots and flying ships. It’s a setting made up of a bunch of shit a kid might like, mashed up together with no concern for internal logic, and the new movie can’t help but start there, too, even though that messes up its whole premise. Masters of the Universe kicks off with an introduction to Eternia in all of its kid–safe–Frank Frazetta glory, summarizing lore about the Sword of Power and its osteal resting place, Castle Grayskull, before exploring the angst of young Prince Adam (played as a child by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), who’s small for his age and easily pushed around during weapons training. Then it flings Adam off to Oklahoma City as a refugee from the attacks of perpetual villain Skeletor (Jared Leto, allegedly), and it becomes clear that no one involved in this project has a clue how to make a tolerable product out of this aging IP.
That’s the bar everyone involved in this movie was aiming to clear, and I’m not just saying that because the “fan screening event” I attended began with a heartwarming speech from a Mattel executive about how “Masters of the Universe was one of the most important brands we wanted to bring to life” (he mentioned Travis Knight only after a long ode to their corporate producing partners). The script for the movie, which is credited to Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and Dave Callaham, feels overwhelming, like something hastily patchworked together from different passes at the story over the years, rendering some aspects repetitive and others nonsensical. Take that sojourn in Oklahoma, in which we see a grown Adam, played by Nicholas Galitzine, go on a failed date, go to his job in human resources, and go home to the apartment he shares with a roommate. There was obviously an earlier version that started here, presenting Adam as either the exiled prince of a fantastical kingdom or an office drone who made up a grandiose backstory for himself to cover up the trauma of his parents’ death. But because the movie leaves no question about our hero’s identity, the Earth interlude is not just pointless but confusing. Like, what happened when a 10-year-old dropped out of the sky with no record of previously existing? Was he adopted, and does he have any investment in the people who raised him? And why does it take him so long to find a sword that appears to have been right down the block the whole time?
It’s possible to make a real movie out of the most dire of corporate circumstances — even a toy line, the way Greta Gerwig did with Barbie, and the way that Knight himself, best known for heading up the stop-motion studio Laika, did with the improbably charming Transformers spinoff Bumblebee. But Masters of the Universe isn’t a real movie. It’s a bunch of half-realized, semi-contradictory ideas accrued over years. It takes the rough shape of a comedy without ever really landing a joke, up to and including the potentially great one that Eternia warriors “Fisto” and “Ram Man” aren’t actually named that, that those are just the childish labels given to them by Adam as a kid. It never decides whether it’s fan service for nostalgic adults who’ll get some juice out of a cameo from Dolph Lundgren, star of the notorious 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, or an action-adventure for kids (Alison Brie, as henchwoman Evil-Lyn, is the only cast member who seems consistently aware she’s in a comedy). It cast Leto as its big bad, despite his reputational baggage and the character’s computer-generated skull for a face, then excised the actor from all promotional events. What was the point of shelling out for his participation in the first place? (He does trill his “Rs” impressively, I guess.)
Its action sequences are marked by endless pratfalls as Adam sorts out his He-Man powers and also endless pratfalls as his former weapons teacher Duncan (Idris Elba) tries to recover from his years as a depressed drunk. This gives their scenes together the feel of two different drafts that were document merged incorrectly. (As Duncan’s hypercompetent daughter Teela, Camila Mendes is left to roll her eyes.) The movie never really decides whether its source material is to be mocked or to be approached with a more wry affection. Worst of all, Masters of the Universe is under the impression it has something to say about masculinity without deciding what that is, exactly. It’s not difficult to see how Knight and company arrived at this thesis, when working with a main character who transforms into a bulgy warrior in a loincloth wielding, as Skeletor himself points out, an incredibly phallic weapon. But it’s exasperatingly impossible to sort out how the movie delineates good masculinity from the toxic kind. The movie wants to free up its hypertough characters to talk about their feelings but also has a clear contempt for the HR speak it presents as the alternative. In his regular-guy garb, Adam acts humiliatingly out of place at the gym and then weird on a date with a model-beautiful woman, despite looking like a handsome if charmless actor who’s been training intensely for months. In his He-Man form, Adam makes a show of reluctance about embracing brute force, then rips his foes’ arms off and beats them to death.
Masters of the Universe ends by making fun of the blunt moral lessons the original animated series punctuated its episodes with but couldn’t come up with even a joking conclusion of its own if pressed. There’s something appropriate about the movie coming out in the wake of two horror movies from 20-something YouTubers that have been setting box-office records. Obsession and Backrooms may not be perfect, but they are both, thrillingly, the visions of their respective young auteurs, while Masters of the Universe belongs to no one — a project engineered at enormous cost from the needs of IP.
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