There are innumerable ways to compliment The Fall Guy, be it Drew Pearce’s sportingly kinetic script, David Leitch’s snappy direction, the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, or its ability to not only elevate the ideas it lifts from the 1980s television series of the same name, but to triumphantly bring its own, original toys to the playground, too.
But perhaps the single greatest compliment you could bestow upon The Fall Guy is that it could have just as easily been called Movie: The Movie, and the fact that The Fall Guy is capable of owning that distinction as a fantastic compliment, is a compliment in its own right.
Indeed, just as those first trailers cheekily telegraphed, The Fall Guy has everything; action, comedy, romance, cowboys, aliens, unicorns, morbid ice baths, lots of car chases, fewer but equally significant boat chases, and Jason Momoa as Jason Momoa. The kicker? It’s all that and, above all, charmingly intelligent, and Leitch and company can breathe easy knowing that they just made the blockbuster to beat this year.
The film stars Gosling as Colt Seavers, a professional stuntman who, after an accident puts him out of work for a year and half, is contacted by film producer Gail Meyer (played by a terrifically devilish Hannah Waddingham; thank you, Ted Lasso, for shuffling her into the spotlight she’s deserved for so long) about a job opportunity in Sydney, Australia. That job is stuntwork on the set of Metalstorm, a sci-fi blockbuster directed by first-time gaffer Jody Moreno (Blunt), who also happens to be Colt’s ex-girlfriend (the “ex” is a result of Colt ghosting her after his accident, which Jody herself witnessed). Colt eagerly takes the job in hopes of making up with Jody, but finds that she’s still upset with him.
Later, Gail tells him that the real reason she brought Colt to Australia was because Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the star of the film, has gone missing, and she wants Colt to find him. Colt agrees to find him so that Jody can get her movie made, but as he plunges deeper and deeper into the case, it turns out to be a much more twisty and dangerous affair than it first seemed.
It is abundantly clear after watching The Fall Guy that the prestige of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar has increased, because Ryan Gosling was nominated for one after his turn in Barbie. Indeed, the Canadian leading man doesn’t miss a single beat throughout the film’s crackling 126-minute runtime, and even when he’s not making the gods of comedic timing smile down upon him, the simple fact that he gets to play in the shoes of a character that’s entirely as likeable as the actor himself is a privilege he runs, jumps, and flips with.
The very same can be said about his co-star and once-Barbenheimer rival Blunt, who’s done a similarly tremendous favor for the reputation of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar (Blunt, of course, was nominated for her performance in last year’s Oppenheimer). Even without the same wiggle room that Gosling’s protagonist gets, Blunt steals every scene she’s in with a delightfully mercurial energy, seeing Gosling’s timing and raising it some pristine wit, and generally embodying a firm, admirable, and contextually mighty vulnerability that serves as the hearty engine to Colt’s more palpable monster truck in the derby that is The Fall Guy.
It’s here, at the world “palpable,” that we arrive at the crux of The Fall Guy‘s genius; the full-throttle-yet-dexterous manner in which it pays tribute to the criminally unsung heroes of the Hollywood blockbuster sphere; the stunt folk.
The television series that The Fall Guy is based on centers around a Hollywood stuntman who picks up extra work as a bounty hunter. It makes sense; when you spend all day taking hits, pulling off death-defying acrobatics, and getting willingly set on fire, the rough-and-tumble world of bounty hunting is no great deterrent to you.
This is the aforementioned idea that the film lifts from the television show. The aforementioned elevation, meanwhile, comes in the form of juxtaposing Colt’s status as a stuntman against Tom Ryder’s thoroughly detestable existence as a movie star. Throughout the film, Colt goes about fighting off assassins, jumping from moving vehicles, and getting mouthfuls of gasoline with a relatively nonchalant attitude (he’s driven to do good by Jody more than anything). It’s true that that’s par for the course for the heroes of action comedies, but Colt being a stuntman adds a whole other layer to that. As a stuntman, Colt is well and truly on the front lines of movie sets, literally risking life and limb for almost nothing in the way of recognition (and no, the film isn’t subtle about what it thinks about that reality). Nevertheless, he takes every event in stride, because he’s a stuntman, there’s a job to be done, and all of these explosions are just a Thursday for him anyway.
Ryder, meanwhile, is a superficial spoiled brat who wouldn’t even think about getting his hands dirty, but who is nevertheless revered by the industry and the public, complete with an expensive apartment and enough powerful friends to give him the illusion that he’s above the law. Indeed, all of those high-stakes hero moments that Ryder pretends to have in his movies? Colt actually does have them, except they’re just moments instead of hero moments.
Colt, then, exists in a fascinating liminal space within the movie, like a rugged donut hole whose awareness of the blockbuster excess around him exists separately from that the audience and the other characters in the movie, and that alone makes him one of the most well-crafted and watchable action heroes to date. Combine that with the fact that The Fall Guy has an intense and unabashed love for pop culture (mostly shown through the animus of Winston Duke’s character Dan, who elicits some of the film’s greatest laughs), and it becomes the easiest task in the world to fall in love with the movieness of this movie. It’s entirely void of cynicism (which goes the longest way in making its more meta elements stick their tricky landings), and is packed to the brim with earnest soul; the very same earnest soul that stuntworkers everywhere bring to the sets of Hollywood, and without whom we would never have so many of the movies we love today.
In closing, The Fall Guy has accomplished the impossible of task of having something for everyone while still being not only a good movie, but a genuinely great movie. It does this by being entirely, consciously committed to its identity of movie magic-meets-behind-the-scenes wisdom and heart, and bringing a confident artistic flair to its limitless playfulness. Indeed, The Fall Guy rises to the occasion, and affably so.
