The Fall Guy Review: A Love Letter To The Stuntman
Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic
There has been a long legacy of classic TV shows being adapted into movies in the last thirty years, roughly around the time of the first ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie. Almost none of them have been as successful as that franchise, and while they have waned in recent years, there is still some potential IP to be mined from them. The Fall Guy is one of those classic shows that had potential adaptations.
Stuntman-turned-director David Leitch is perfectly situated to adapt this show, which ran for five seasons in the 80s, about a Hollywood stuntman who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. In the film, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) isn’t a bounty hunter but a stuntman who got out of the business after a fall nearly killed him. He is lured back by movie producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddington), who tells him that former flame and first-time director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) requested him for stunts on her movie being filmed in Australia.
In actuality, Jody is oblivious to him coming back and, after spending 18 months getting over him, is not prepared to have him on the set of her new movie after he shut her out of his life after his injury. It turns out, though, that Gail brought Colt onto the set to try and find the star of the movie, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who has gone missing. As Tom’s former long-time stunt double, Gail thinks that Colt is uniquely qualified to get in Tom’s head, track him down, and maybe save Jody’s movie and win her back.
Essentially, this film is a love letter to the stunt crews of Hollywood, the industry’s unsung heroes. It’s nice to see a film give these people their due on the big screen, and the film incorporates a lot of big action stunts to try and wow the audience, including a boat jump, a 225-ft car jump, a fall from a helicopter, and a Guinness World Record barrel roll. Gosling’s Colt finds himself in plenty of hand-to-hand combat scenes, as well as a car chase through the streets of Sydney.
This is a big-budget film with practical effects on full display.
There are some meta winks at the camera going on, too, as the film often takes things ‘behind the scenes” on a movie set, showing behind the curtain how the magic gets made, sometimes unglamorously, with take after take after take. There’s also a scene where Gosling and Blunt talk to each other on the phone about the merits and drawbacks of doing a split-screen scene, which is done in split-screen.
There have been some comparisons to Gosling’s role in The Nice Guys; this is unfair as The Nice Guys is a comedy I hold in the highest regard, so this is more like a poor man’s version or cousin of his Holland Marsh. Still, this is the proper use of Ryan Gosling as a star, making fairly good use of his comedic ability and leaning into his charm. Gosling and Blunt have decent chemistry together, as well.
However, Gosling has almost equally good chemistry with Winston Duke, who has a supporting role as Colt’s stunt buddy/boss, Dan, who regularly throws movie quotes at him in important situations.
The stunt work in The Fall Guy is pretty impressive, as many practical effects went into it. What is less impressive is the pedestrian storyline, which hampers the film. Anytime the plot leaves the action for any time, it loses momentum. It is clear fairly early on who the story’s villains are, so there are few surprises.
While the plot is pretty much paint-by-numbers, the action in The Fall Guy is befitting a movie that is an ode to the underappreciated and hardest-working people in Hollywood who have been around since the inception of movies. Gosling and Blunt provide enough star power to make this a more than passable blockbuster but not a truly memorable one. It’s unlikely to reignite the craze in TV-to-movie adaptations, but there might be enough for a sequel, though the box office will likely have a big say.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars