The Fall Guy Review: Witty, Romantic, Action-Packed Fun

It’s not often that an audience is treated to a movie about making movies, and even when they are it isn’t likely that it’s a movie about the unsung heroes of film production, like stuntmen. Directed by David Leitch (Bullet Train, Atomic Blonde), a former stuntman of 20 years, The Fall Guy is the action-packed, stunt-heavy shout out to stuntmen that they’ve deserved for so long.

Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is a former stuntman and current valet driver after an accident during a stunt left him with a broken back. The Fall Guy follows Colt as he reconnects with his former lover, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) in an effort to save her directorial debut, Metal Storm. Jody’s lead actor, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has gone missing and it’s up to Colt to do whatever it takes to find him, even as the circumstances surrounding Ryder’s disappearance become increasingly dangerous.

As you’d expect from a film about stuntmen directed by a former stuntman, The Fall Guy is full of action and is absolutely loaded with practical stunts. Flipping cars, jumping off buildings, throwing people through windows, The Fall Guy has it all and more. One impressive first-act stunt scene on a beach in Sydney, Australia featured one of the most show-stopping practical effects in cinema, the cannon roll, where a vehicle is fitted with a device similar to a cannon that shoots the ground and sends the vehicle flipping into the air. The Fall Guy’s cannon roll is special though, as it set the record for most cannon roll rotations in a car with 8.5 rolls, and it was a spectacular sight.

This stunt-first film isn’t all just smashed glass and crashed cars, however, as it’s Gosling and Blunt’s chemistry steal the show. Casual and collected while still being fun and flirty, their conversations and quick back-and-forths throughout the film feel real. Plenty of the film’s marketing will try and sell the movie on the fact that Colt is trying to win Jody back, but that’s not exactly what’s happening here. Colt very clearly cares about Jody, but in a way where he’s going to be supportive of her whether he wins her back or not. He’ll be ready to jump at the chance to be with her again, yes, but what’s most important to him is helping her get her movie made, and the film greatly benefits from not having him pine over her for the entirety of the story. In the same vein, Jody’s not just going to be a damsel in distress waiting for Colt to fix all her problems. She’s more than willing to bring up what her issues with him are and keep working on her movie alongside her conflicting feelings. Colt and Jody feel like two adult humans working on a relationship rather than one person chasing after another in some misguided example of “romance” that you often see in movies.

Elsewhere in The Fall Guy, I found that more than just the film’s two stars were captivating, with Winston Duke giving a delightfully humorous performance as an old stuntman friend of Colt’s and Aaron Taylor-Johnson with a goofily unhinged performance that we don’t often see from him. The film as a whole is also very funny alongside the action and romance, with plenty of witty writing that helped showcase not only Gosling’s comedy chops, but also Blunt’s, Duke’s, and Taylor-Johnson’s. The comedy isn’t just in the writing though: Gosling has a penchant for physical and facial comedy that pairs well with his unique, slightly-amused deliveries, but perhaps some of my favorite funny moments in the film came right in the middle of some of the action sequences, with more than a few fights involving prop-weapons that lent themselves well to both action and humor.

So many movies that have wowed audiences over the years wouldn’t have been possible without stuntmen, stuntwomen, and all the other crew members you don’t see on the screen, and David Leitch makes an effort to combat that with The Fall Guy. We see so many people working hard on the in-universe set of Metal Storm, and often we’re seeing them do their jobs well, especially when it comes to the stunt crew. The Fall Guy is the perfect love letter to those who work on movies that don’t always get the credit they deserve.