An action rom-com with all the elements for something iconic, David Leitch’s The Fall Guy features truly remarkable stunt work and charismatic performances by Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, yet buckles under the weight of its plot. Adapted from a 1981 action series that lasted five years, the film would have been best-served as a complete reboot jettisoning much of a plot that intrudes and ultimately means less time for Blunt and Gosling together.
What remains, though, is a love letter to the craft of stunt work with stuntman-turned-director Leitch providing a behind-the-scenes peek both on the set of the giant-budget action film Blunt’s Jody Moreno is directing and, later, during the film’s credit sequence. The Fall Guy, along with Richard Rush’s classic The Stunt Man and Dan Hartley’s thoughtful documentary David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, are all excellent cases for creating a new Academy Award category for achievement in stunt work.
Drew Pearce’s screenplay, despite some great one-liners, need not worry about a nomination. It concerns Gosling’s Colt Seavers, a buff professional stuntman who has a fling with Blunt’s Jody, a camera assistant-turned-director. She’s given a chance to make a mega-budget space cowboy epic by high-strung producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham). Gail works with Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an action star who, unlike Tom Cruise, has come to regret his stunt double because he has never done his own stunts.
After a mishap on set, Colt returns to action in Sydney, summoned by Gail to work on Jody’s debut feature MetalStorm and is informed Tom has gone missing. Getting his legs back, Colt is hired to ensure Jody has great footage to show off at Comic-Con. Meanwhile, the film itself––a space love story where a space cowboy falls for an alien––is on shaky ground and the studio is starting to get cold feet even before Ryder’s disappearance.
Borrowing the DNA of the 1981 series, Colt is deployed in the field to bring back his narcissistic star in passages that are far less interesting than the romantic comedy elements between the real stars of the picture. As anyone who has ever worked on a film set knows, it’s an intense time in which a crew often becomes a family unit and crushes, romances, and friendships form, only to quickly break off once photography wraps.
The Fall Guy is so perceptive about providing an accessible behind-these-scenes look at the dazzling, unseen work that it’s a shame the film gets bogged down in a crime caper that underdelivers––even if it allows for one breathtaking stunt sequence involving a dumpster truck and Sydney at rush hour.
The Fall Guy sheds some light on behind-the-scenes craft but is finally attempting too much. A stuntman / bounty hunter (as was the plot of the Lee Majors-led series) is a compelling concept (think Gosling in darker roles à la The Place Beyond the Pines) but an altogether different movie. This is essentially three in one; while the romantic comedy and set-bound gags work, the hunt for Ryder––and the cartoonishly inept gangsters and drug dealers that populate his underworld––compel less.
All this said, stunt work and direction of action sequences by Leitch are top-notch even if tonally the film doesn’t stick the landing. Sometimes it’s just as simple as wanting to see more of two likable stars do what they do best in an exotic location.
The Fall Guy premiered at SXSW 2024 and opens May 3.