Movie Nation

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

Amazon has this romance, from the director of “The Big Sick,” coming to Prime on Friday.

Looks cute. “Best seller” wish fulfillment fantasy by Robinne Lee, Oscar winning leading lady and all.

Don’t know the leading man, Nicolas Galitzine (“Purple Hearts”), but that means nothing in the streaming era.

Few live action comedies mimic the lurid comic book style of Japanese manga as accurately or amusingly as “City Hunter,” a gonzo beat-em-up/shoot-em-up knife-fight riot based on the comic by Tsukasa Hôjô.

“Kasane” director Yûichi Satô, action choreographer Takashi Tanimoto and a legion of effects animators, “bullet time” masters and the garish neon and strobe-lit city of Tokyo — with its strip clubs, drag clubs and endless cosplaying conventions — make this candy-colored extravaganza pop off the screen.

And star Ryohei Suzuki (of “Egoist”) carries it on its merry, dumb way with the loopy, leering womanizing smirk and action hero swagger the title role requires.

Ryo is a swashbuckling detective, a do-gooder who hunts down missing persons based on requests scrawled on subway chalkboards. He is quick with his fists, quicker with his feet and a real dead-eye private eye when it comes to gunplay — shooting to wound or disable, often from impossible angles (backwards), never ever missing, no matter what revolver or semi-automatic he’s emptying.

He’s also a bit “pervy,” into porn and pretty women, sometimes in that order. This latest “Find my sister” request came from a woman he only knows as “Miss Sweater Melons.”

Luckily, he’s got ex-cop (Masanobu Andô) as a partner to keep him on task and maybe tamp down the stalker/ogler tendencies. When he loses that partner to the citywide outbreak of drugged-up people “losing all control” and flipping out, violently, Ryo is saddled with that partner’s naive sister, Kaori (Misato Morita).

They must track down the subject of Miss Sweater Melons’ search, a wild child cosplayer named Kurumi ( Asuka Hanamura), get to the bottom of this new drug’s purveyors, keep the police detective Saeko (Fumino Kimura) at bay and maybe get a little help from the Old Man of the Underworld (Isao Hashizume).

Legions of henchmen and a masked Brown Bear monster meant to be this story’s “Bane” must be fought and bested if they’re to save the day.

Yes, the plot is strictly formulaic, from the hero’s trench coat to his partner’s eyeglasses to the “car with character” Ryo drives — a ’70s vintage Mini Cooper.

But Suzuki makes a grandly is entertaining tour guide to “the world I live in” for Kaori and by extension, the viewer. Ryo is recognizable on the streets, catnip to the ladies and popular at a local drag club. He’s fit and cut and not shy about taking the stage as a stripper if it’ll get him into the underworld night club’s black-room casino.

And yes, he’s “kind of pervy.” It’s as obvious as his outgoing message on voice mail.

“I’m currently nursing a boner and can’t get to the phone…”

“City Hunter” never overcomes the cliched story or the cartoonish nature of the violence. But we can ignore that because the filmmakers get the pro forma details right. Montages of city CCTV cameras capturing drugged folks “losing all control” (in Japanese, or dubbed), over-the-top brawls, high-stakes one-on-one fights, garishly decorated discos, and a visit to a cosplay convention that embraces the fun and the creepy nature of it all (Japanese men’s obsession with panties, and photographing pixies wearing them).

And Suzuki makes the silly story fun to follow between fights with a giggling, juvenile charisma that is hard to resist.

The film becomes a manga that doesn’t transcend the “comic book” nature of it all. It wallows in it, and is all the more fun for it.

Rating: TV-MA, gunplay, bloody violence, nudity

Cast: Ryohei Suzuki, Misato Morita, Asuka Hanamura, Masanobu Andô, Fumino Kimura and Isao Hashizume

Credits: Directed by Yûichi Satô, scripted by Tatsuro Mishima, based on the manga (comic book) by Tsukasa Hôjô. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

There isn’t much that would recommend “Scandal” to a cinephile who isn’t trying to finish off The Complete Works of Akira Kurosawa. It’s a sentimental, maudlin melodrama with comical flourishes, not as ambitious or epic as the director’s best work.

But the immaculate compositions — sampled above — and the crisp editing, the vivid slice of Japanese life sanpled and the depictions of post-war Japan’s rapid “Americanization” make it a fascinating artifact. And Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, two of the most important Japanese screen actors ever, star in it, with singer-actress Shirley Yamaguchi (her music was in “Crazy Rich Asians,” “House of Bamboo,” etc.) and 290 credit character actor Eitarô Ozawa, who plays the villain.

It’s not scaled to the scope of the breakthrough period pieces that made Kurosawa’s reputation. And it lacks the emotional depth of the more intimate films of this period in his career. But it’s pretty entertaining and well worth a look.

Mifune plays a dashing artist whom we meet on a mountain overlook, painting Mount Kumotori in front a few simple, happy locals. A pretty stranger (Yamaguchi) shows up, having missed her bus. He offers to give her a lift to the inn in Kaminoyu, where they both happen to be staying.

Of course he rides a motorcycle. And he’s fond of his pipe. Ichirô Aoye isn’t really famous, but he cuts quite the figure. But singer Miyako Saijo, once he realizes who she is, has paparazzi on her tail. She IS famous, and the paps would love nothing better than to snap a few candid shots.

A chaste but friendly and perhaps indiscrete visit to her room, pointing out the views from her balcony is where they’re photographed, in bathrobes.

Amour Magazine is thrilled to publish it with a ginned-up story headlined “Love on a Motorcycle.”

“Shouldn’t we check?” the reporter wonders (in Japanese with English subtitles). Naah, the editor cracks. “The picture PROVES it!”

Aoye finds himself plastered all over walls and telephone poles as Amour Mag sells out and becomes the talk of the town. When he finally motorcycles up to their office, he takes his time reading the article in front of the editor and the smirking publisher (Ozawa). Being a badass, after a suspenseful minute or three, he punches publisher Hori right in the kisser.

He’ll SUE! Well, maybe they’ll sue each other, even though lawsuits were very rare in Japan back then.

As his outrage is covered by other publications in a gossip-obsessed Tokyo, a down-on-his-luck lawyer (Shimura of “Iriku” and other Kurosawa classics) comes to express sympathy, share his “injustice” outrage, and offer to take the case.

Aoye’s favorite artist’s model (Noriko Sengoku) may see the warning signs in the slovenly legal eagle. But even a visit to the drunk’s racing-form filled dump of an office won’t dissuade Aoye once he’s met the man’s tubercular teenage daughter (Yôko Katsuragi).

“A man’s family reveals his character.”

Besides, as he tries to enlist a very-reluctant Saijo in the suit, “The important thing is that we’re in the right. How can we lose?”

Oh, let us count the ways.

The second act of “Scandal” shows us how the case is sure to unravel, how the weepy old man representing them is one big liability. And the third act is taken up with a long and very Japanese court trial.

Mifune was always a riveting screen presence. But one thing you pick up on in his early films with Kurosawa is this head scratching affectation that he brings to scene after scene, expressing befuddlement and rising fury. It’s a wonder his hair survived those years.

The patience his character shows with Trainwreck, Attorney at Law, seems far fetched. But the film has this idealism about The New Japan, a new justice system, freedom of the press pushing back for their “right” to “harass.” That’s what Aoye is idealizing and choosing to believe in.

He throws himself into entertaining the sick teen (Yamaguchi sings “Silent Night” to her in Japanese), motoring in with a Christmas tree on the motorcycle, taking the old man out drinking for New Year’s Eve (Mifune and Shimura sing “Auld Lang Syne” in Japanese).

None of it adds up to all that much, but “Scandal” is engaging and immersive, serving up bits of old culture and tourism in collision with a changing society and an early Western-style Japanese “media circus.”

And Mifune and Shimura soldier through this slight film with a hint of warmth and pathos to go with the promise of working in the masterpieces to come.

Rating: TV-14, innuendo

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Shirley Yamaguchi,
Takashi Shimura, Yôko Katsuragi, Noriko Sengoku and Eitarô Ozawa

Credits: Directed by Akira Kurosawa, scripted by Ryûzô Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa. A Shochiku production now streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:45

All in one promo/preview.

Those “prisoners” supernaturally imprisoned in human bodies, bouncing between the distant past and the Korean present as “Alienoids” are back.

“Alienoid: Return to the Future” is, if anything, even harder to follow than “Alienoid.” But plainly “following” whatever the hell is going on in Choi Dong-hoon’s head and in his movie isn’t really the point.

It’s just as loopy, perhaps a little more whimsical and just as easily described as silly, dumb “eye candy” as ever.

As in the first film, the pan-dimensional “prisoners” are torn between taking over human bodies as their “prisons,” and escaping that mortal flesh in a bid to unleash haava, the pinkish-red cloud that will alter Earth’s atmosphere, wipe out humanity and leave all that land for them.

Ten years have passed, and Lee Ahn, or “Ean” in the print I watched (played by Kim Tae-ri) wanders ancient Korea, seeking the Divine Blade that might free others from the “inmates” imprisoned in their flesh and turn the tide against the evildoers and Jarang (Kim Eui-sung), their shaman/leader.

Ean don’s disguises (a mustache that fools no one) and alters her voice (fooling even fewer) as the magic martial artist pixie hides from the pursuing (digital) cats, Left Paw and Right Paw, who take human form at times as they track her on behalf of Mureuk (Ryu Jun-Yeol).

A blind swordsman/shaman (Jo Woo-jin) is also wandering the past, hunting and taking on all comers.

Meanwhile, in the present day, Customs Agent/secret warrior Min Gae-in (Lee Hanee) is on the case, trying to figure out who is possessed by whom, ready to trot out her own supernatural fighting skills when the pistols come out, as they often do.

“How far back does the wheel of fortune turn?”

There is a space ship that can travel through time, modern guns which those flung into the past whip out, and enchanted sabres and swords, a sword-fan with a mind of its own and arrows that could do a lesser mortal in, which is why they’re all so good at parkour and, you know…FLYING.

The wirework is impressive, the fantasy effects spectacular and the fights sometimes fun in this sprawling, colorful and somewhat empty-headed spectacle. A favorite gag has Min Gae-in throw a punch through a magical mirror that gives her a fist The Hulk would shy away from fighting.

“Hard to follow” includes just keeping the characters straight as they seem to switch allegiances, often through no control of their own, and the character names don’t line up neatly with IMDb or other credits websites.

But these “Alienoids” still treat us to something resembling a simple cinematic thrill ride. Don’t try to follow it, don’t attempt to anticipate what’s coming. Just don’t sweat anything like a “detail.”

After all, “We are all just pines trees by the courtyard” in the end — Korean wisdom in alienoid form.

Rating: violence, some profanity

Cast: Kim Tae-ri, Lee Hanee, Kim Eui-sung
Ryu Jun-Yeol, Kim Eui-sung and Jo Woo-jin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Choi Dong-hoon. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:02

A new “Lion King,” a prequel, with new tunes by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Kelvin Harrison and Donald Glover and Beyonce and her child and Aaron Pierre and and Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner.

All voicing digital critters of the Serengeti!

That Intellectual Property keeps on paying off for Disney. Maybe. Dec. 20.

“I Am Gitmo” is an earnest attempt at bringing the Guantanamo Bay inmates’ story — foreign nationals accused of terrorism, held and tortured for years, with no trials or hope of release — back to the headlines.

It’s a downbeat, low-energy, modest budget affair that covers some of the same ground as “The Mauritanian,” “Camp X-Ray” and many documentaries on this “extra legal” prisoner of war purgatory.

Basically, the best reason to make it is that people are still being held there. And it’s always a challenge shooting a movie without the money to build replicas of Afghan neighborhoods, a prison camp on a military base and the like, and seeing how convincing you can make it all.

But you’ve got to have more than good intentions and a grasp of how to do things on the cheap — mothballed “museum” military aircraft as backdrops, an intentionally “fake” tank, a coil of barbed wire to mimic an exercise yard — to justify making a movie that’s already been made and a story that others have already told.

Flat performances of a dull and cliche-ridden script aren’t enough to make us forget that Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart and others got there first, with more money and a more compelling version of this story to tell.

Philippe Diaz’s high-minded movie tells us the story of one inmate, Gamel (Sammy Sheik), an Egyptian veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviets who stayed in Aghanistan afterwards, married and had children and became a school teacher.

But weeks after the U.S. invasion after 9-11, he is betrayed by a neighbor cashing-in on the American bounty on “terror suspects,” handcuffed and hooded and spirited off to one “enhanced interrogation” after another.

“Right arm of Osama bin Laden,” he is labeled by his CIA torturers. “You have no rights. Nobody cares about you.”

Eventually, prisoner 121 is masked and flown to Guantanomo Bay.

That’s where he becomes the responsibility of John Anderson (Eric Pierpoint), an Army interrogator summoned back to active duty to (reluctantly) break all the “rules” and ignore all his common sense under this new regime, “approved by the president,” defending by the vice president in a TV interview he watches at one point.

We hear Gamel read from a wrong letter to his wife that may never make it to her, recounting his dismay, terror and outrage at his treatment. We also hear the religious Anderson write a diary for his daughter, who keeps urging him to watch videos of Nelson Mandela to see the error in his ways.

The film introduces no holds-barred torturers, smirking and abusive enlisted personnel, always ready with a Polaroid, a lawyer and one of Gamel’s fellow inmates as one and all recover familiar ground and try to animate hoary lines like “Last chance! Where is Osama bin Laden?”

This “Taxi to the Dark Side” has the phrase “a compelling story” hardwired into it. But Diaz (“Now & Later,” and the doc “The End of Poverty” were his) and his experienced but charisma-starved cast of unknowns fail to bring it to life or make us care.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Sammy Sheik, Eric Pierpoint, Paul Kampf, Jason Reid and
Iyad Hajjaj

Credits: Scripted and directed by Philippe Diaz. A Bayview Ent. release.

Running time: 1:55

Aborbs.

Even that curmudgeon Frank Oz gets a little emotional here.

May 31.  Disney plus remembers Jim Henson.