The Fall Guy: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt deliver a blast of pure high-wire showmanship

Around a quarter of an hour into The Fall Guy, I found myself wondering if I might be watching the antidote to everything that had gone wrong with popular cinema in the Past 15 years. That’s not to say that director David Leitch’s new film is perfect: in fact, it’s virtually saying the opposite, since it’s scrappy and freewheeling in all the ways that make a movie feel warm-blooded.

It’s about a stuntman who becomes a scapegoat in a shady Hollywood conspiracy, and who has to leap, scuffle and rev his way to clearing his name – while his enemies try to bring him down with, among other things, a dastardly flourish of digital effects. (It’s based loosely on a 1980s American television series of the same name, featuring Lee Majors.)

It may not astonish you to hear that Leitch, is himself a former stunt performer. But it may knock you sideways you to hear that he was also behind the gruellingly smug action thriller Bullet Train, from 2022. The Fall Guy is everything that previous film was not: witty, fresh, inventive, winningly at ease in its own skin, and propelled by nitro-blasts of movie-star charm from its leads.

Adding to his Ken-led portfolio of loveable lunks, Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers, our man. Emily Blunt, meanwhile, is his former girlfriend Jody Monero, a long-time camera operator now in the director’s folding chair on Metalstorm, a corny Dune/Mad Max hybrid. For initially murky reasons, Colt finds himself whisked to Sydney, Australia, in order to appear in Jody’s film – having often doubled for its star, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Tom Ryder, in the past. Though this Tom is a cosseted egomaniac for whom (supposedly) doing his own stunts is a core part of his personal brand, he definitely isn’t meant to be Tom Cruise, since the script makes a point of mentioning Cruise separately, by name, twice.

By day, on set, Colt and Jody put their prior heartache behind them and flirt up a storm. (An early scene in which they clear the air via loud-hailers under the thin pretext of a character motivation talk is uproarious, and is smartly allowed to play out at length.) Then after hours, Colt is enlisted by Ryder’s pterodactylish producer, played by Hannah Waddingham, to track down her A-list client, who has gone Awol days before the shoot. Individually, these plot strands might have felt spongily lightweight – but writer Drew Pearce braids them together into a bright and nostalgic sugar high, like the marshmallow cords of a flump.

He also just about manages to rationalise the wide and ludicrous range of stunts Colt has to pull off both while on-set and miles from it, from a fist-fight in an overturned skip that’s being dragged at speed through central Sydney to jumping a speedboat over an exploding oil tank. Colt’s quietly satisfied look of I-knew-it after performing the latter sums up everything The Fall Guy gets right: this is pure old-fashioned high-wire showmanship, in which the risk is its own reward.

12A cert, 126 min. In cinemas from Thursday May 2