It might be based on a weathered, folksy and cheesy TV series of the ’80s, but every minute of the big screen version of “The Fall Guy” reminds us it’s a MOVIE movie, a spectacle.

Break out the popcorn.

An action comedy about the movies, it’s a noisy, cutesie and violent love letter to the unheralded art of the stunt performers, the “Fall Guys” and Gals who take the tumbles, race and roll the cars and let themselves be set on fire if the script demands it.

And dammit, a lot of the time it does. They work hard for the money. Not that anybody knows their names.

“I don’t know why I’m talking so much,” our hero, Colt Severs, narrates. “I’m not the hero of this story.”

Ryan Gosling is this version of high-mileage stunt double Colt Severs — played by Lee Majors on TV — with Emily Blunt as the camera operator turned director of photography promoted (after the prologue) to director, Jody Moreno.

The players are charming, with Gosling fast becoming North America’s sweetheart, and that counts for a lot.

The laughs are here, the crowd-pleasing stunts and “fan service” touches — an homage to the TV series, a very smart stunt dog who only understands French, elaborate “fool the villains with cleverly conceived stunt craft” and movie magic bits.

But it isn’t exactly the out-of-body experience summer popcorn pic we’ve been hoping for. The relationship is tentative, wounded, and a little cartoonish, the plot more complicated and frustratingly convoluted than it needs to be.

The stunt man and the camera operator are having an on-set “fling” on a production in that prologue, which ends with Colt having a near-fatal on-set accident.

Over a year after his fall, Colt is summoned back to work by the big shot Brit producer (Hannah Waddingham of “Ted Lasso”) to double his delusional former star-partner Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, not remotely as funny as one would expect). Jody is making her directing debut on “Metal Storm,” a silly sci-fi blockbuster “and she asked for you” personally, or so Colt — cooling his heels as a car parking valet — is told.

But once in Australia and on set, he finds Jody didn’t “ask for” him. And star Ryder has disappeared. Colt is motion-captured so that Tom’s face can be “faked” over his in the stunts in the finished film. He must hurl himself back into the danger, double the fight scenes, dealing with Jody’s brittle, vengeful off-camera directions and back-story motivational speeches, delivered by BULLHORN and getting personal enough to make everybody on set who hears this squirm.

And after shooting, he’s got to go and find the real “Space Cowboy” star and get him back on set. Stumbling across a corpse in a tub sets our plot in motion, as Colt is in over his head, but always ready with a fist, a piece of furniture or a firearm as bad guys set out to silence him and the movie production is threatened with being shut-down if the missing star’s absence is ever discovered.

Colt has to juggle all this on and off-set danger and get across his real feelings for Jody while taking the blows with little more than a pained smile and a thumb’s-up after every near death experience.

It’s the “fall guy’s” way. “

“The Fall Guy” has big stunts and big explosions and a couple of good gimmicks — a cell phone conversation which deconstructs the efficacy of filming two actors in ’60s-style “split screen” scenes, this conversation itself handled in split screen, for instance. People talk in movie quotes from “Rocky,” “The Last of the Mohicans” and (Universal intellectual property) “The Fast and the Furious,” to comic effect.

A couple of the filmmakers’ aesthetic choices stand out.

One is using the KISS disco anthem “I Was Made for Loving You Baby” as a kitschy recurring gag, treated with more romantic sensitivity in some scenes than the band ever gave it. And then there are the stunts themselves, epic in a few cases, and as often as not, it’s too obvious Ryan Gosling is not “doing his own stunts.”

That underscores the message and agenda of the movie, that stuntmen and stunt women, from Yakima Canutt to Zoe Bell, rarely get their due. And “deep fake” tech allows productions to paste movie star faces on stunt bodies, should they so desire. But after the third or fourth time in which even a casual viewer might say “That’s not Ryan G.,” its real effect is to take the viewer out of a movie, at least momentarily.

And considering the uncertain pacing and sort of lurching-along narrative, that’s not good thing.

Stuntman turned “Deadpool 2” and “Hobbs & Shaw” director David Leitch is at home making the stunts pay-off. But the dead patches and uncertain pauses for the love story are evident from the start and really become a liability in the later acts. As stunt man movies go, it’s a lot better than the Burt Reynolds laugher “Hooper,” but not in the same class as “The Stunt Man.”

Sequences can be both awe-inspiring and slow-footed, and character rationales seem more popcorn pic perfunctory than anything Ms. Blunt would sign off on as convincing and reasonable. I didn’t buy the romance. I’ve never seen her act more tentative on camera. She’s trying to play “in charge,” ambitious and broken-hearted. We get it. But Leitch & Co. do her no favors when they drown out her pained karaoke cover of “Against the Odds” with the Phil Collins version. Perhaps they were the “tentative” ones.

Yes, the leading lady has some agency, Taylor-Johnson gets a few scenes to get across what he’s trying to do with the character, Winston Duke (as the stunt coordinator on “Metal Storm”) and Stephanie Hsu (as a can-do, badass production assistant) make impressions.

And the wonderful Australian actress Teresa Palmer (“Warm Bodies”) is here, but her stunt double has more moments than her.

The picture is thus a mixed bag, rather like “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Deadpool 2,” and Leitch’s “Bullet Train” — violent, funny, but leaning on Gosling’s twinkling charisma and inside-the-movies jokes and pratfalls to come off, which it does just often enough to recommend.

Rating: PG-13, violence, drugs, profanity

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Teresa Palmer, Winston Duke, Stephanie Hsu and Hannah Waddingham.

Credits: Directed by David Leitch, scripted by Drew Pearce, based on the Glen Larson TV series starring Lee Majors. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:06