A spirit of good will animates the new action comedy The Fall Guy (in theaters May 3)—a tribute to the bruised, battered, and otherwise hard-working folks who do so much for movies but rarely get credit. They’re the stunt performers: limber and willing folks who throw themselves in front of cars or down hillsides, allow themselves to be set on fire or dropped from a great height, all to make a movie seem that much more real. The Fall Guy, written by Drew Pearce and directed by David Leitch, honors those craftspeople the best way Hollywood knows how: by giving their work some movie star glow.
It arrives in the form of Ryan Gosling, fresh off of Barbie and still leading with his light side. This is the better form of Gosling, mesmerizing as some of his grim, laconic performances have been. Here he plays Colt, a once sought-after stuntman who has quit the business after a bad workplace injury sapped his confidence and cost him his lady love, Jody (Emily Blunt). In the meantime, Jody has ascended from camera operator to director of a big-budget studio film shooting in Sydney, Australia. Through some trickery on the part of dogged producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Colt accepts a job doing all the difficult physical stuff that the film’s preening star Tom (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) refuses to do.
The cute setup gets cuter when Tom goes missing, and Colt finds himself caught up in a relatively low-stakes criminal conspiracy. He’s being shot at and doused in gasoline, so things could certainly get deadly—but no one is trying to save the world here. Instead, it’s the movie that needs saving, the jobs of hundreds of crew members who are trying to put on a good show. Though the same cannot be said of the studio suits in the industry’s current race toward streaming oblivion, the day-to-day folks working in film production still cherish the art form, a love to which The Fall Guy pays sweet homage.
It does so with a wryness familiar to anyone who has seen a Shane Black film—indeed, Pearce has a writing credit on Black’s Iron Man 3. An antic, sideways wit enlivens the film’s best scenes, either jags of bouncy dialogue or amusingly sequenced action set pieces. Leitch is prone to overembellishment, as is evident in the relentless and often incoherent wisecracking of Deadpool 2 and Bullet Train. But here, he reins in at least some of those impulses. At times he comes close to the delightful controlled-chaos of Black’s The Nice Guys, which The Fall Guy perhaps most closely resembles, Gosling and all.
While the stunt work is impressive—and the film’s appreciation of it is, uh, appreciated—The Fall Guy is maybe even more successful as an ode to the increasingly elusive X-factor that is star power. The film gazes in wonder as Gosling smoothly does his thing, playing an affably jaded guy simply trying to get through his day and, maybe, rekindle a romance. Gosling’s performance is a reminder of how many just-okay action movies of yesteryear easily coasted on charisma. The Fall Guy is more than okay, but it would be a lot less without Gosling’s laidback warmth, his elastic sense of timing, his nimble physicality.
And it would be even less without Emily Blunt, one of the business’s most appealing A-listers. She is, unfortunately, a little sidelined in The Fall Guy. But when she’s given a chance to shine, she radiates. A karaoke scene sets up a trite joke: isn’t it funny when someone earnestly sings a supposedly cheesy old ballad from the 1980s? But then Blunt nails it, keenly balancing the irony and the sincerity. (She’s singing Phil Collins’s “Against All Odds,” a beautiful song.) She deftly calibrates Jody’s reaction to Colt’s sudden reentry: aloof but curious, sad and hurt but eager to forgive. Blunt is a joy to watch, both with Gosling and without him; let’s make her the true lead next time.
While Jody is belting out Phil Collins, Colt is having a fist fight in a dumpster that’s being dragged through the streets of Sydney, Fast Five-style. Scoring an action scene with an improbable pop tune has become de rigueur to the point of passé over the years, but Leitch finds a way to make this particular juxtaposition feel weird and almost fresh. The Fall Guy is often that: a slightly better version of what has long been cliché. Which is what movie stars are there to do, on some projects anyway. And stunt people, too.
