The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy is exactly what you think it will be – a fun action movie with cool stunts and enjoyable performances by charismatic stars. And that’s a good thing.
Full Disclosure: Any movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt is already starting out ahead. They’re two of the most watchable and appealing movie stars working today, and their comedic chemistry, as evidenced by their hilarious Oscars presenting gig and the press junkets they’ve been doing in the leadup to this movie, is right on point. So long as the movie itself didn’t totally let them down, The Fall Guy was probably bound to be enjoyable. It was.
Review
There’s a lot of be said for a movie that knows exactly what it is. You’re not going to see The Fall Guy expecting Fellini. It doesn’t pretend to any deeper meaning, doesn’t attempt to complicate its plot with any wild twists or turns to mislead the audience. It just tries to entertain. It’s silly, but fun. And especially as we head into summer movie blockbuster season, there’s always time for a movie like that.
The Fall Guy is loosely based on existing IP in the form of a television show from the 80s. I can only imagine that the initial studio meeting for this went almost exactly along the lines of a Ryan George “Pitch Meeting” sketch.
Producer: “Do you remember The Fall Guy?”
60-year-old Studio Exec: “That’s that thing that used to exist!”
Producer: “Well we’ve got a movie about a stunt man that we’re going to call The Fall Guy.”
Studio Exec: “Will there be a lot of similarities to the original show?”
Producer: “No idea!”
Seeing as the vast majority of people who go to see this new film version of The Fall Guy probably aren’t even aware that the original exists, it really doesn’t matter. They do give Lee Majors and Heather Thomas a quick cameo in a mid credits scene though, so I guess that’s nice.
The Fall Guy is directed by David Leitch, a former stuntman and stunt coordinator, and this whole movie comes across as a love letter to his former career. There’s a joke in the movie about the fact that there’s no Oscar for stunt work, something which seems to be a bit of a cause for those involved in the film. There’s even an extended sequence during the end credits where they show the actual stunt people who did the stunts for this movie.
The plot is fairly straight forward. Colt Seavers (Reynolds) is one of the best stunt men in the world, and the go-to guy for famous actor Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Colt is also in love with an up-and-coming camera operator, Jody Moreno (Blunt). But when a stunt goes wrong on set and he’s injured, he cuts himself off from the world in shame, including sacrificing his relationship with Jody. Fast track to 18 months later, and Colt receives a call from high powered producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) that he’s urgently needed to save a production – and it just happens to be Jody’s directorial debut.
With two leads like Ryan Reynolds and Emily Blunt, you almost don’t even need to put them in crazy scenes like this, but they did, and it’s a lot of fun.
Colt flies to Australia for the shoot and is told by Meyer that Tom Ryder got mixed up with some bad people and has gone missing, and she needs him to find the famous actor in order to save the production. In the meantime he’s also put to work on some of the most dangerous stunts in the movie, especially as Jody uses multiple re-takes as not-so-subtle revenge on Colt for leaving her and cutting off contact.
The two obviously have a lot to work on to regain trust in their relationship, and the movie does a great job of using the filming process as a humourous metaphor for the issues they’re working through. In one really well done scene, Jody tries to explain the plot of the movie they’re working on to Colt in front of the whole crew, but it’s obvious to everyone that she’s talking about their relationship, and the crew and extras (many dressed as aliens) take sides by showing their sympathy to one or the other.
All of this works for two reasons. The first is obviously because the two leads are so magnetic on screen, and their comedic timing and tone is perfectly in sync. The second reason is that the script is light and playful, and manages to blend the overall story about the disappearance of Tom Ryder seamlessly with the one about Colt and Jody’s relationship. There are also some genuinely impressive stunts throughout the movie and it moves along a fairly decent clip so that you don’t have to wait too long before there’s another big action sequence. You can tell that Leitch and his stunt team had a lot of fun making this movie.
Spoilers Ahead
Is that James Bond?! Not exactly the image you might have of the suave superspy, but a movie like demonstrates Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s range and probably makes me feel even more comfortable with the idea of him taking on the iconic role.
The only real twist comes about halfway through, and it plays out as more of an explanation of what happened than a real twist. It turns out that Tom hasn’t really disappeared. He accidentally killed a stuntman and it was caught on video. But Meyer, eager to save her prize movie star, brought Colt in to be…wait for it…the fall guy and set him up to take the blame for the murder.
The rest of the movie involves Colt trying to find a way to exonerate himself and pin the killing on the real culprits, Tom Ryder and Meyer. Taylor-Johnson and Waddingham are great in these villain roles. Taylor-Johnson has apparently been chosen as the next James Bond, and it’s difficult to think of a more un-Bond-like character, as he plays Ryder as stupid, selfish, cruel, and weak all at once. Waddingham, who recently had a great run in Ted Lasso, also demonstrates her range as an actor, in a fast-talking antagonist role that is completely different from her turn as a villain in Game of Thrones. They both add a lot to the movie, as does Winston Duke, who plays Colt’s stunt coordinator and good friend.
While the final conflict comes close to being a bit cartoonish at times, it still manages to work because everyone is just having so much damn fun. There are also about 5 or 6 more incredible stunts in the final sequence alone, which is more than enough to keep the audience interested.
A movie about movie-making that doesn’t bore the audience? Sign me up.
5 Quick Hits
Sydney harbour is definitely having a moment in film. Between this movie and the recent rom-com Anyone But You, the harbour and Sydney Opera House have featured prominently in two recent hits. The Australian Tourism Board must be ecstatic.
Unfortunately, a bunch of the funny lines from the trailers for The Fall Guy don’t actually make it into the movie. I hate it when that happens. I understand why, trailers are often put together from a random collection of dailies before the final film is edited, but it’s still annoying.
There are some pretty good musical needle drops in this movie, including one instance of making great use of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” in a karaoke scene that’s intercut with an action sequence.
Early in the movie, there’s a bit of a running gag after Colt arrives jet-lagged in Australia that he can’t seem to get a cup of coffee. Something always happens to prevent him from getting a sip of his much needed caffeine. Unfortunately, the movie never pays off the gag for some reason. It would have been pretty easy to show him finally getting a cup of coffee sometime after the climax of the movie, but it seems like they forgot about the joke. Weird.
Since this movie is all about the stuntpeople it feels right to point out that one of the stuntmen that worked on the film - Logan Holladay – set a world record for a stunt performed in the movie. The record is for the most cannon rolls in a car, and when you see it in the movie, it is actually pretty hard to believe that it’s real, let alone that someone was inside the car as it kept tumbling over and over, and yet walked away unscathed.
