Film reviews: The Fall Guy | Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (15) *****

Anyone who grew up in the 1980s on a steady diet of imported American television may vaguely recall The Fall Guy, a goofy show about a Hollywood stunt performer called Colt Seavers (played by Lee Majors) who moonlights as a bounty hunter and uses the skills of his day-job to track down criminals. It had an ear-wormy country-and-western-tinged theme song (The Unknown Stuntman, sung by Majors himself) and climaxed each week with some elaborate action set-piece in which Seavers and his team would engineer an outlandish stunt to coax some above-the-law reprobate into confessing their crimes. Not exactly memorable TV then, but in Hollywood’s ongoing IP-obsessed blockbuster culture, when every non-original studio film has the whiff of desperation about it, it’s easy to see why stuntman-turned-director David Leitch (Bullet Train) might want to revive it as a vehicle for Ryan Gosling.