Images courtesy of Universal Pictures
THE FALL GUY– 3 STARS
To the uninformed, The Fall Guy, helmed by Bullet Train and Atomic Blonde director David Leitch, is loosely based on the ABC adventure TV series of the same name that starred Lee Majors and ran for 113 episodes across five seasons from 1981 to 1986. Its theme song, “Unknown Stuntman,” was sung by Majors himself over an opening credits sequence that stitched together famous stunt shots from old movies. Once that introduction played, Majors followed with this voiceover introduction:
“This is a story of one of America’s great unsung heroes. I mean, you’ve seen him, but you never knew who he was. You’ve cheered for him and cried for him. Women have wanted to die for him. Did he ever get any credit or the girl? No. He was what we call a ‘stuntman,’ and the reason I’m talking so fondly about him is because he’s me: Colt Seavers.”
LESSON #1: PUT SOME RESPECT ON THEIR NAMES– Listen to all that recognized love expressed through cheers, tears, and popped buttons, all for the uncelebrated daredevils out there putting their lives on the line for our entertainment. There’s a good chance the 48-year-old David Leitch, who broke into Hollywood as a stunt coordinator before taking the top chair the last few years, sat enthralled and inspired as a youngster on his couch Wednesday nights. Like many others watching The Fall Guy, David found out Majors was right. Stunt workers deserve their kudos and their own love interests.
Through a cavalcade of creatively designed set pieces, Leitch and The Fall Guy put the bang in “the whole shebang” with this kinetic crowd pleaser positioned to open the 2024 summer movie season with that very sound effect. After years of development hell, Universal Pictures found their perfect stewards with David Leitch and Ryan Gosling and indulged their pyrotechnic and brawny dreams to bust every block in sight. The TV show’s awareness and appreciation for these behind-the-scenes champions has now become Leitch’s own.
Gosling’s framing narration introduces us to Cole Seavers, currently the go-to stunt double for the world’s biggest action star Tom Ryder (the much-rumored next James Bond Aaron Taylor-Johnson, channeling a boobish Matthew McConaughey parody). In his mind, he’s working his dream job with his dream girl– camera operator Jody Moreno (Gosling’s “Barbenheimer” rival and fellow recent Oscar nominee Emily Blunt)–and her flirty behavior often nearby and piped through an ever-present walkie-talkie line. Everything’s appropriately peachy until an on-set accident severely injures Cole’s back.
The epic fail forced Cole into retirement from the stunt scene and shattered his confidence. Without the adrenalized profession, Cole has spiraled to shut everyone out–including Jody– while making ends meet parking cars as a valet at a Los Angeles Mexican restaurant. Hope returns when Tom Ryder’s producer partner Gail Meyer (Ted Lasso Emmy winner Hannah Waddington) seeks him out to work alongside Ryder again on Jody’s first directorial effort, a space opera entitled Metal Storm, shooting in and around Sydney, Australia. Cole jumps at the resurrection chance more to see Jody than to shadow Tom again.
LESSON #2: THE WORKING ENVIRONMENT OF A MOVIE SET– With this inspiration, there’s a peach pit center inside of The Fall Guy that is essentially a big screen workplace comedy, only a busy office of cubicles is supersized into the stunt department army in production on a major motion picture. The Fall Guy shows the hierarchy of communication and preparation, from a hired hand like Cole and his stunt coordinator best friend Dan Tucker (an overqualified and underused Winston Duke of Us and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) on up to Jody and Gail ruling from the top. One little twist with the set of Metal Storm is that Jody didn’t know Gail was bringing back the estranged Cole.
In this setting of coordinated banter and teamwork, the first 45 to 60 minutes of The Fall Guy are perfectly paced with fly-on-the-moviemaking-wall entertainment as one could hope for. Gosling and Blunt have undeniable desirability and magnetism on full display. Their cohesiveness is punctuated by a romantic and hilarious bullhorn-to-bullhorn exchange where the two present their characters’ tenuous and overdue feelings thinly veiled in the metaphors of a director talking about the character he’s playing and him describing the caked-in-fire challenge of the stunt to his boss. The two lovers we root for have cleared the air and are back together.
After this reunion, the wires that yank and tug what’s supposed to be an engineered and calculated world in The Fall Guy start to warp and tangle. Slightly matching TV show’s aim where the title character moonlights as a bounty hunter using his elite driving and combat skills to his advantages, Cole is given an urgent side quest by Gail to find Tom Ryder who’s gone missing from his swanky Sydney digs. Ryder’s absence threatens to shut the whole production down and ruin Jody’s debut. Cole won’t let that happen, so the chase is on.
LESSON #3: EVERYTHING CHANGES ONCE A DEAD BODY SHOWS UP– Now, if The Fall Guy kept this delving-for-the-diva pursuit as simple as clever clue investigation, encounter skits with colorful suspects, and some city-traipsing jaunts as transition scenes, the outcome would stay inventive and tempered in the convolution department– all without sacrificing any of the thrills and spills matching the lead’s profession. However, once a dead body shows up in Tom’s hotel room, the sweet-spot lightheartedness that could have carried the whole movie veers poorly and is muddied beyond repair. Thereafter, all of the consequences are immediately doomed to become more and more preposterous the longer The Fall Guy careens and crashes.
LESSON #4: DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MOVIE NEEDS?— As a result, The Fall Guy swells 20 minutes and two climaxes too long. It’s a shame because the showy basics– Cole Seavers, a cagey actor to play him, the promised execution of high-level stunts (including a cinema record car roll), an update of Majors’ signature GMC pickup truck, and a slick B-plot mystery– are all present and, quite honestly, plenty. Somewhere and for someone, that wasn’t enough. Ambition can be fun, but this finished film feels like the real-life version of the Gail character showed up with a notepad checklist of “Do you know what this movie needs?” pitches and demands for extra action ideas, whether that was machine guns, boats, helicopters, or more drums of gasoline to ignite. The Fall Guy is an odd and ironic case in this day and age where an increase of the normally thin or absent stakes we bitch about might have become too high and too much.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1199)
