Let’s get something straight here, folks; it is okay to be wrong. In any healthy relationship, most of all the one you have with yourself, there is a bountiful margin in which making mistakes is a safe thing to do.
Stephen King is, by all reasonable observations, not a man of many mistakes; his novels have laid the groundwork for some timeless big-screen classics, and his Netflix recommendations have a tendency to be—and I’m speaking in scientific terms here—pretty awesome.
But we all have our misfires, and Stephen King is only human after all. As such, we should at least consider forgiving him for suggesting that The Fall Guy—a recent David Leitch action-comedy blockbuster led by one Ryan Gosling—isn’t actually as good as the world is rightfully making it out to be.
Now, the celebrated horror author didn’t outrightly say The Fall Guy wasn’t a good movie; he acknowledges in the tweet above that it’s a fun movie, with the caveat that it just isn’t “great fun,” as his colleague Linwood Barclay characterized it.
Still, you have to consider the fact that King felt compelled to point out that The Fall Guy wasn’t “great fun,” but just average fun, which suggests that he felt strongest about not praising The Fall Guy out of whatever emotional responses he may or may not have had to it. That is a relatively peculiar emotion to give the lead to, but to direct it towards The Fall Guy is an outright infraction.
To King’s credit, the movie is absolutely not the cup of tea you’d associate with the novelist, whose interests chiefly lie in his bread-and-butter genre of horror and other thrillers ranging from dark to psychological. The Fall Guy is none of these things; indeed, Leitch’s film plays in the way that plenty of movies play, but also in ways that most movies don’t (and when they do, they do a poor job of it). It has the most fun with itself first and foremost, and that translates superbly to our own fun.
So, as far as blockbusters that are head-over-heels in love with being a movie—so much so that it evokes an energy that could best be described as the antithesis to cynicism—The Fall Guy is one of the best you can get, and even if it doesn’t win you over in the way that it didn’t win King over, it’s very hard to deny the sheer nutrition of the creative space that it occupies.
So by all means, King, sound the alarm on the Baby Reindeers of the world, but as far as action comedies go, watch your step.
The Fall Guy is now available on VOD.