‘The Fall Guy’ takes stunt casting to new heights

Article content

With the Hollywood stunt community continuing to lobby for its own Academy Award category, The Fall Guy arrives as Exhibit A in the case for a stunts Oscar. Helmed by stuntman-turned-director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train; producer of the John Wick series), it’s an action-comedy-romance-mystery, heavy on the flipping cars, high-speed chase scenes and plummets from tall buildings. Not surprisingly, plot is the least important thing here. Surprisingly, the quieter romantic comedy scenes are the best.

But that’s probably inevitable when you have Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt as leads, two actors who could class up the reading of legal boilerplate. They take this clever meta-blockbuster about the behind-the-scenes making of a blockbuster and give it warmth, intimacy, idiosyncrasy and laughs. The result is by far the most recognizably human movie Leitch has made to date.

Links to the 1980s TV series starring Lee Majors are tenuous at best, but that’s the modern Hollywood way: Take a fondly remembered intellectual property, refurbish it with modern stars and CGI, and send it up while playing it straight. Gosling plays Colt Seavers, an accomplished stuntman and longtime stunt double for an arrogant idiot of a box office star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). An on-set accident early in the film sends Colt out of the business and away from camera operator/girlfriend Jody Moreno (Blunt), but time passes and he gets a call from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham of Ted Lasso). Jody has gotten her big break directing a sci-fi epic called “Metalstorm” in Sydney, and she needs her best stuntman.

Or so Colt thinks. Arriving in Australia, he’s immediately enmeshed in a case of a missing movie star, which spirals out into a web of drug kingpins, dead bodies in bathtubs and a cellphone that everybody wants. The Fall Guy cares less about the whodunit or the whydidit than the what’sgonnahappen, with each step of the mystery pausing for an extended and lavishly choreographed action scene. They include a nightclub fight sequence with a drugged Colt seeing neon tracers with every swing of his fists (not to mention the occasional unicorn), a car chase through downtown Sydney involving a garbage truck and an attack dog that responds only to commands in French, and a bit where Colt and his friend and stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke) battle some heavily armed villains with a blank pistol and a possibly rubber tomahawk.

So, yes, there’s humour here, and also a lot of blood, sweat and bruises – this is not one of those movies where the hero scales the Burj Khalifa and makes it look like a trip to CVS. At its heart, The Fall Guy honours the craftsmanship and camaraderie of stuntmen and stuntwomen – “You don’t know they’re there, and that’s the job,” says Colt – and no more so than in the scenes of the movie within the movie, a ridiculous slab of big-budget aliens-and-cowboys nonsense. The movie isn’t important to Colt. What’s important is the next cannon roll, the next flame suit, the next leap into the void.

And Jody. The movie acknowledges the pleasure and passing of on-set flings (“flingettes,” she calls them), but it also captures the wary playfulness of co-workers in the storytelling industry who are congenitally unable to separate fiction from reality. One of the funniest scenes in The Fall Guy has Jody and Colt arguing over the plot of the movie they’re making through megaphones in front of the entire cast and crew; everyone knows they’re talking about their relationship, and nobody really minds. The movie’s just a metaphor; the movie doesn’t even matter; what Gosling and Blunt put across is the crackle and joy of people working together on the job to be done today.

Likewise, The Fall Guy doesn’t really matter, especially in its final scenes, when the necessity of wrapping things up takes over and the movie turns noisy and ordinary. Until then, it’s an unexpectedly charming diversion – a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and centre. That the end credits show us Gosling’s own stunt double, Logan Holladay, in the action scenes is just one more curtain whisked away from the never-ending levels of make-believe. The movie’s like that M.C. Escher print of two hands drawing each other – except here they’re slapping each other silly.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

Three stars. Rated PG-13. At theaters. Contains action and violence, drug content, and some strong language. 126 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.