The Fall Guy [Review]
David Leitch’s love letter to stunt performers is an action comedy crowd pleaser.
The Fall Guy. Credit: Universal Pictures.
Director David Leitch’s (Bullet Train, Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde) new action comedy, The Fall Guy, is an ode to the Hollywood stunt community, practitioners of a dangerous and essential art that goes criminally unrecognized by the Academy Awards. Based on the TV series from the 1980s, the movie is a joy from start to finish. This is popcorn movie magic at its best.
Ryan Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, a stuntman and the titular Fall Guy. He’s riding high as the stunt double of superstar and clueless mega-asshole Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and is in a budding romance with camera assistant Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). After a nearly fatal on-set accident, he falls into a deep depression and leaves the business, ghosting Jody in the process. A year later, he gets a call from Ryder’s producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), who begs Colt to come work on Ryder’s latest film shooting in Australia; he refuses until he learns that it’s Jody’s directorial debut and sees it as a chance to mend things between them.
It turns out Jody didn’t want Colt there. Gail called in Colt under false pretenses: Tom Ryder has gone missing, and Gail is keeping it a secret because the studio will shut down the film if they found out. She asks Colt to find Ryder, a favor he only accepts because he doesn’t want Jody’s production to end in disaster. The movie turns into a detective mystery as Colt is thrown into a lot more danger than he bargained for, danger that thwarts his efforts to get back into Jody’s good graces at every turn.
The Fall Guy is packed with impressive action. There’s certainly a lot of digital compositing utilized, but there’s obviously a lot of love put into physical stuntwork and effects. Not only is there a lot of screentime where Gosling’s reluctant action hero uses his skills as a stuntman to survive all the danger he’s thrust into, the movie also takes great pains to show us how the sausage is made on a film set. I love this about the movie; beginning from the opening montage of real stunts it works to help audiences appreciate what goes into all those death-defying—sometimes actually lethal—feats they see on-screen. The end credits fittingly feature a behind-the-scenes look at some of the real stunts from the movie.
The Fall Guy was marketed to audiences mostly on the merit of its action and the Gosling/Blunt romance, but it’s a really funny movie. It was surprising for me just how hilarious it was. There are a ton of great visual gags and contextual jokes that just about all hit, and the trailer mercifully didn’t reveal any of them, so I won’t spoil them here. Gosling proves again he’s got fantastic comedy chops. There are even some great bits with a dog that aren’t eye-rolling, featuring my favorite character, a dog named Jean Claude that only responds to French.
The film plays metatextually with movies as a form. In one scene, Jody calls Colt to discuss the third act of her film, which she’s not-so-subtly rewriting around the success or failure of their reconnection, and pitches the idea of using splitscreen to convey the distance between the lovers. The film then immediately shifts to splitscreen for the rest scene, where the mise en scène playfully demonstrates the film language used to build the tension she’s describing.
Even in a scene like this, where they’re technically not together in a frame, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt have wonderful on-screen chemistry and are great scene partners. They both carry the movie, but they do have an excellent supporting cast. Winston Duke (the best character in Marvel’s Black Panther) plays Colt’s friend and stunt coordinator Dan Tucker. Aaron Taylor-Johnson does a great job as a vapid star and Post-It note obsessed dumbbell. Stephanie Hsu is great in small role as Ryder’s career-hungry assistant.
The Fall Guy is undoubtedly Leitch’s best film yet, not counting his role as co-director on John Wick. I may be biased because I have a soft spot for movies about movies and filmmaking, but this one hits it out of the park. It’s a well paced and hilarious joyride, a perfect microcosm not only of the escapism Hollywood strives for, but also of how it’s made.
The Fall Guy opens in theaters on May 3, 2024.
