It's so close to being great, it just needed half an hour cut out and a Shane Black rewrite. There's loads of fun stuff in there, it just regularly loses steam and focus. Whenever it gets away from 'stunt guy uses his skillset to survive peril' it starts to drag: the romantic storyline feels disconnected and distracting, and the villains' plot is too busy (they lampshade this at one point but that doesn't magically fix it) and occasionally nonsensical.
Also, for a movie about a stunt guy directed by a stunt guy, a lot of the stunts feel too fake or underwhelming. A lot of them look better in the bts footage that plays over the credits than they do in-movie. I think it may have been a combination of too much wire-removal and digital enhancement plus an overuse of close-ups to show off how much the actors are doing - it just never looks as good as the GoPro wide shots.
Anyway, I enjoyed it, laughed a fair bit, and thought some of the melee combat was great (Gosling and Blunt are excellent, and Duke gets some good stuff though not as much as I would have liked), but still came away a bit disappointed.
Rating: sporadically great but overall a bit of a waste.
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