Film Review: The Fall Guy

Spoilers!

Movie magic involves a lot of moving pieces and people — check out the credits scroll after any movie for a reference point — and one of the most purposefully unseen bits of magic are stunt men and women, or stunt doubles. Quite literally because they’re doubles, they’re not supposed to be seen. The glory goes to the actor or actress. In that way, 2024’s The Fall Guy is a lovely homage to that bit of magic, to the stunt doubles and stunt coordinators who give away the glory with a thumbs up.

Colt Seavers (played by the ridiculously, effortlessly charismatic Ryan Gosling) is a stuntman for Tom Ryder (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who incidentally does a nice “doubling” of Gosling), a worldwide action star. He’s also smitten with Jody Moreno (played by the effortlessly effervescent Emily Blunt), a camerawoman with aspirations to be a director, and she likes him, too. Then, a stunt goes wrong and Colt breaks his back. He retires from being a stuntman and shuns Jody, too embarrassed to connect with her again — he figures she was into the stuntman, not the broken man.

Then, 18 months later, Tom’s film producer, Gail Meyer (played by Hannah Waddingham, who, without trying, looks villainous even before it’s revealed she is the villain) brings Colt back into the fold to double for Ryder’s latest film, Metalstorm, with Jody as the first-time director. Of course he jumps at it (heh). Related to the many moving pieces of a film, they also show how hectic the job of a director is when Jody is being bombarded with questions from various people on the set from the pyro guy to the screenwriter all while timing everything perfectly. In a funny bit later, upon realizing Colt is back after essentially ghosting her, Jody explains the script of Metalstorm, a space operatic cowboy movie (the sexy bacon) wrapped around her grievances over Colt, while having Colt continually be set on fire and thrown against a rock. That’s gotta be cathartic for women everywhere.

In one of my favorite scenes of the movie — which doesn’t involve action and instead is Colt and Jody in a set truck together — Colt is listening to Taylor Swift’s, “All Too Well,” and crying, and Blunt shows why she’s fantastic in everything she does explaining her grievances again. Then she asks Colt to drive her to her own vehicle, which is less than 100 feet away. Ha.

Later, Gail sends Colt on a mission to find Tom, who has fallen in with bad people, and bring him back to set. What’s great about Colt as the action hero of the film is that because of his stuntman training, he’s the perfect action star! He has a fun back-and-forth with Tom’s girlfriend, wielding, as it turns out, a prop sword, at Tom’s apartment. Then he goes to a nightclub, with an incredibly stylish fight scene in neon colors that later involves Colt stopping a vehicle with his … body. Hilariously, because he’s been drugged, Colt is also hallucinating a unicorn following him around. Once Colt finally gets to Tom’s hotel room, he sees a dead body in a bathtub. When he tries to show the police this, the body is gone.

Gail again butts in just as Colt and Jody are rekindling their relationship to send Colt back to the United States. Instead, being the action hero he’s become, Colt continues tracking down Tom, leading to another visually impressive action sequence where Colt chases after Tom’s security team who has kidnapped Tom’s personal assistant who has video of Tom killing the stunt double who had replaced Colt, i.e., the dead guy in the bathtub! In order to see the video, they needed to unlock Tom’s phone, so, Colt and Dan Tucker (played by Winston Duke), stunt coordinator on Metalstorm, go to Tom’s apartment. They encounter his security people again. Hilariously, they fight them with movie props, like a gun loaded with blanks, and use hand-to-hand training they learned in movies. Dan is able to escape, but Colt is captured. Tom, in classic movie villain mode, gives a monologue explaining how Colt was set-up by him and Gail to be the “fall guy” for the murder (I love a double meaning for a title!). He also orchestrated the original back-breaking accident at the beginning of the film because Colt was “taking his spotlight.” In a bad-ass moment, Colt is able to escape by holding gasoline in his mouth and spitting it back out at the security when they try to light him on fire. An epic boat chase scene ensues on the Sydney Harbour in front of the Sydney Opera House. Colt fakes his death, but is fingered by the media as the killer on the lamb.

The meddlesome Gail tries to convince Jody of Colt’s guilt, but Colt returns to set and convinces her of his innocence (after she nearly kicked his ass for surprising her in an alien costume). They trick Tom into participating in a stunt sequence to capture his confession on tape. Gail steals the tape and tries to abscond with Tom on a departing helicopter only for Colt to leap onto the landing skids to fight them for it. He’s able to and thanks to Dan’s stunt team below, Colt does the backward drop again into a crash mat.

Metalstorm premieres as Jody hoped at San Diego Comic-Con (Hall H!) with, hilariously, Jason Momoa in the lead role in a fun cameo. Colt is exonerated, of course.

Then, in one of my favorite parts of the whole film, while the credits are rolling, we see the true stuntpeople behind The Fall Guy doing the stunts in the film, and yes, they do the thumbs up, even when the car crash is painful or the backward fall hurts. So impressive and admirable. After the credits, Gail is arrested and Tom is blown up by accidentally triggering pyrotechnics on the set (this is why they called in Momoa). Apparently, The Fall Guy is based on a 1980s TV series and the original Colt (Lee Majors) and Jody (Heather Thomas) are the two cops who arrest Gail at the end. That’s pretty neat.

The Fall Guy was directed by David Leitch, who showed his stylish bona fides in previous films Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2, and written by Drew Pearce. A lot of credit goes to Jonathan Sela for some beautiful cinematography, to the point where, I’d love to see Metalstorm because it looks like a mix between Mad Max, a Clint Eastwood film, and aliens. Throughout the film, they would show us the behind-the-scenes with Jody and then what movie magic renders. So cool. One of the best scenes in The Fall Guy is a fluid split-screen between Colt and Jody when they are still on the precipice of rekindling their relationship. Gosling and Blunt have such chemistry, it stretched through a split-screen!

I wish I had tuned into The Fall Guy sooner. It was a great movie, with pitch-perfect comedy, inventive action set pieces, fun hand-to-hand combat, incredible stunt sequences (no surprise there!), including what I have to imagine was a stunt dog (which is so freakin’ cool), a killer soundtrack (in addition to Swift, I loved Jody’s karaoke performance of Phill Collins’ “Against All Odds,” one of my low-key favorite songs!), and of course, earnest, well-earned love between Colt and Jody. And the best part: a kick-ass love letter to stunt coordinators and stuntpeople everywhere. As the song that played during the credits explained, they are the “unsung heroes.” The film even points out that the Academy still doesn’t recognize them with Oscars. There should at least be a category for Best Stunt Coordinators. It’s long overdue!

I could watch Gosling and Blunt do anything. Watching them do it through a fun movie like The Fall Guy is all the better.