The Fall Guy, written by Drew Pearce and directed by David Leitch, recalls the kinds of breezy but big-scoped action comedies Arnold Schwarzenegger might have starred in and John McTiernan might have directed in the 1980s. It doesn’t feel overly reverential of the past, though, even when its protagonist, played by Ryan Gosling, is talking nostalgically of cutting his teeth on Miami Vice, a show definitely too old for him to have been a fully functioning adult on the set of. The Fall Guy gets the bulk of its old-fashionedness from its insistence on action sequences mostly reliant on practical effects and careful choreography — from a brawny protagonist who is not a superhero but an everyman who happens to have been bestowed with near-superheroic physical gifts. It’s likable, if slight and (pleasantly) overlong; it’s the kind of lighthearted action movie I might have enjoyed even more had I seen it on a balmy summer evening and not an unseasonably cold and rainy morning.
The Fall Guy’s title character is a veteran stuntman named Colt (Gosling) with youthfully frosted-tipped hair and an aspirationally ripped-and-tanned body. Both characteristics are dutifully maintained to effectively twin the movie star for whom he almost exclusively performs action sequences: a vapid primadonna named Tom (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Getting into car crashes and leaping from scarily high heights have for so long been Colt’s forte that he’s mostly thinking about the drinks he might grab after work with his camerawoman love interest, Jody (Emily Blunt), when in the thick of something dangerous. But he gets a rude awakening at the beginning of the film when the rope meant to safely assist him during a stunt malfunctions. He breaks his back; he spends 18 months recovering.
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy. All photography courtesy of Universal Pictures.
The recovery time seems more mental than physical for Colt. It’s a frightening reminder to a guy who professionally cheats death that it’s possible to get hurt, even die. He freezes out everybody in his life, even Jody, and opts to unsatisfyingly valet for a shabby Mexican restaurant. He’s coaxed out of retirement, though, when he gets word from Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Tom’s producer whose main traits are that she’s conniving and the type to drink a can of Diet Coke through a plastic straw, that Jody is at last going to direct her own movie. She wants Colt to lead her stunt team.
That turns out to not actually be true. Jody is still angry with her former flame, to the point that the storyline of her John Carter (2012)-esque project is a thinly veiled allegory for their time together. Gail, it turns out, has ulterior motives. Tom has disappeared and is said to be in deep trouble with some bad people. She requests that Colt, rather than the police, be the one to look into the wheres and the whys to avoid a movie-sinking scandal. Colt eventually stumbles upon a body, and as a result he becomes a most wanted-style figure who, for a while, seems doomed to tragically live up to the film’s title. He spends the rest of The Fall Guy trapped in a game of cat and mouse where he’s thrown into high-stakes scenes in speeding cars and boats and other classic vessels for hot pursuits that imitate the kinds of action he’s made a living simulating.
The Fall Guy is often said to be a love letter to stunt performing — it’s how Leitch got his start in the movie business — and the film coasts on the easy thrills of well-executed, if sometimes muddily shot, action. In a change of pace from the hyperviolence of Leitch’s other films, you hardly notice anyone getting killed; the worst you see are the beginnings of some nasty bumps and bruises, as if you were watching a kid’s cartoon. (The film is a huge improvement on Leitch’s last movie, 2022’s Bullet Train, whose action sequences were kinetic but whose attempts at comedy were so strained that the jokes had a way of putting you in a bad mood.) Yet I found myself happiest watching The Full Guy not when it’s most eager to get a viewer’s blood pumping but when it’s most like a comfortingly conventional romantic comedy — a genre Gosling and Blunt, actors who are very good at being charming, feel made for despite rarely starring in them.
Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy. Photo by Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures.
They give Pearce’s writing an almost improvisational naturalness when their characters flirt; they seem as at ease in the middle of a romantic exchange as they do in the thick of an action set piece, which in The Fall Guy are not always mutually exclusive. These feel like movie-star roles in an era largely without them: the film wouldn’t be nearly as fun without established names at the front. The Fall Guy functions as a victory lap for Gosling’s work in Barbie (2023), a movie that appreciated his comedic bravado and still-strong heartthrob good looks with a commentative flourish, and as a reminder of Blunt’s not often tapped-into action-comedy chops, which were used decently in the recent Jungle Cruise (2021) and wonderfully in the underappreciated Edge of Tomorrow (2014).
Gosling and Blunt can make you forget (and if not quite forget, soften) that the movie only gets more narratively contrived as it goes on, and that it probably doesn’t need to be longer than 100 minutes. I liked being around them — a quality that feels rarer in actors than it did in the 1980s and ‘90s, decades in which this movie would not be as anomalous as it is in the current action-movie landscape. The Fall Guy makes you yearn for the way things used to be; if its box office weren’t as underwhelming as it’s being reported, it might make you more hopeful about how things could be.
Peterson Reviews 