It’s not easy for a movie to succeed at Hollywood satire, as one can only depict Hollywood stars as smug twits so much. It’s also not easy to pull off an action-comedy without failing at either the action or comedy parts. And the concept of adapting a movie from a decades-old TV show has seen better days.
The new movie The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch, pulls it off. It finds a creative way to satirize showbiz while combining action and comedy in natural and complementary ways. And its tribute to its 1970s origins also works more often than it doesn’t. The film has genuine movie-star performances from Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, whose chemistry together is crackling. Between Barbie, the Oscars musical number, and a successful recent SNL appearance, Gosling is on a roll.
The Fall Guy is a fun, funny movie. Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a veteran Hollywood stuntman, hopelessly in love with cinematographer Jody (Blunt). After he’s injured in a stunt gone wrong, Colt’s pressed back into service for an alien action movie, which happens to be Jody’s directorial debut. The film’s built around Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an arrogant movie star for whom Colt is the double.
(Much like the recent Glen Powell/Sydney Sweeney vehicle Anyone But You, The Fall Guy is set in Sydney, Australia, for no apparent reason, although I’m guessing tax incentives played a part.)
Colt is soon seen going toe-to-toe with criminals in elaborate action set pieces that repeatedly require him to draw upon his stuntman skills. The highlight is a chase through Sydney featuring a production assistant (Everything Everywhere All at Once standout Stephanie Hsu) and a stunt dog trained to bite bad guys in the testicles. And this is cut together with… a karaoke scene.
Leitch, the director, is an ex-stuntman who co-directed the first John Wick film and went on to helm Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, and Bullet Train. The notion that stuntmen are unheralded heroes of cinema who deserve both more credit and an Oscar category is a repeated theme. There’s also the right amount of tribute to the old TV show with Lee Majors.
So many action comedies miss out on the comedy part, but that’s a repeated highlight here, with witty dialogue and even better structure. There’s one hilarious bit about a hotel key card not working and another in which Blunt wears an alien prop glove during a phone call. Drew Pearce, who worked on Hobbs & Shaw and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, wrote the screenplay.
The film flirts with bad taste at one moment, in which a character is made to participate in a dangerous stunt against his will; this has happened a few times in real life, including the infamous moment with Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman. In light of the Alec Baldwin/Rust incident, however, the film’s careful to keep any scenes of prop gun humor away from the on-set scenes.
I give The Fall Guy credit for successfully side-stepping what looked like a significant plot hole near the end. This is looking like a barren movie summer, devoid of blockbusters, thanks to strike-related delays. If any other film this summer pulls things together as well as The Fall Guy, I’ll be shocked.