As of late, pressure has been steadily growing to add an all-important category to the yearly Academy Awards: Stunts and stunt choreography. Part of that push has come from The New Yorker’s entertainment site, Vulture, and its now annual stunts-related awards. Whether that push succeeds in convincing the Academy’s voting body to add a new category is anybody’s guess, but with the release of the David Leitch-directed The Fall Guy, a delightfully sloppy love letter to the semi-anonymous stunt performers who’ve brought kinetic, physical action to audiences since the dawn of film, the chances are better today than they were yesterday,
Loosely based on the mostly forgotten ‘80s TV series created by uber-producer Glen A. Larson (Knight Rider, Magnum P.I., Battlestar Galactica), The Fall Guy centers on the aptly named Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling, in magnetic movie-star mode), a professional stunt man and smug, self-entitled action-star Tom Ryder’s (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) preferred action double, and Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a camerawoman eager to move up the production ladder and direct a feature film of her own. They’re also more than co-workers. They’re romantic partners on the verge of taking their relationship from casual to serious, from undefined to exclusive.
Career and romance fall headlong into the figurative and metaphorical ground when Colt, a stuntman through and through, trained to suppress emotion, feeling, and even physical pain, suffers a grievous injury on-set, leaving him bitter, frustrated, and incapable of sharing any part of his rehab with anyone, specifically Jody, who he not so promptly ghosts, leaving two unhappy people, an expensive movie shoot Down Under, and an earnest, star-driven rom-com plot that just might bring them back together. If only The Fall Guy’s over-convoluted central storyline would let them.
Colt has work to do on himself, but that’s put on the back-burner when he receives an unexpected call from Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), the executive producer behind Metalstorm, a big-budget space cowboy flick and Jody’s first film as director. Gail claims Jody wants Colt back as Ryder’s double and needs him within 24 hours. With an offer he can’t refuse and hope in his newly reopened heart to rekindle his romance with Jody, Colt agrees, only to find everything’s a lie: Jody doesn’t know he’s coming to the Australian set, he’s not slotted in as Ryder’s stunt double, and in reality, Ryder has disappeared and Gail wants him back on set before anyone notices.
That particular development sends The Fall Guy haltingly into neo-noir territory: Colt, hardly a detective, private or otherwise, let alone a bounty hunter like his long-gone, hazily remembered TV predecessor, scrambles for clues as to Ryder’s whereabouts. In short order, Colt finds a body on ice, interchangeable, mean-mugging thugs on the menu, and his body bruised, battered, and slightly torn from a handful of increasingly chaotic, frenetic, stunt-heavy fist fights, car chases, and at least one or two seemingly death-defying jumps and/or pyrotechnics.
Part rom-com, part action-com, and part neo-noir, The Fall Guy feels engineered to be an all-quadrant, demographic-wide crowd-pleaser, probably because that’s exactly what it is. Haphazardly cobbled together from multiple genres and tropes, The Fall Guy often lurches from one major plot line to another, dropping quips and meta-references of variable quality along the way. A good number of screenwriter Drew Pearce’s (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Hotel Artemis, Iron Man 3) jokes fail to land with regularity. Recognizing that the Ryder disappearance plotline doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, Pearce smartly signposts the strain put on the other “legs” of the film (romance and action).
Former stunt-choreographer-turned-director David Leitch (Bullet Train, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Atomic Blonde), however, fully understands that The Fall Guy’s strengths lie not in the script, but in his stars, specifically Gosling and Blunt and their off-the-astronomical-charts chemistry. They not only make the changing parameters of their off-again, on-again romantic relationship believable, but every painful bump, obstacle, and stall along the way to reconnection they both want but can’t see or find beyond their own own hurt, anguished feelings.
The Fall Guy opens theatrically on Friday, May 3rd.
