The Fall Guy review

it's fun

Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy. Image via Vulture.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

I’m probably the only person willing to point to The Fall Guy as the best popcorn film of 2024. It’s a goofy action comedy with a romantic side, and a lot of people who’ve seen it like it, but it’s often referred to with words like “disposable.” It’s not as acclaimed as Dune: Part Two or Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and it’s not as widely seen as Deadpool & Wolverine or Twisters. But I love it, and here’s why.

It’s got a very simple set-up. Our hero, Colt Seavers, is a Hollywood stunt performer who quits his job and breaks up with his girlfriend Jody after a back injury. He ends up back in the stunt business when he’s asked to find a missing actor he used to double for. While doing this he has to do stunt work for Jody, now a film director, with a predictably prickly dynamic between them. The Fall Guy is, legally speaking, based on a short-lived TV show from the 1980s. It has practically nothing in common with the show and it’s not designed with fans of the show in mind, so I think we may as well treat it as an original story.¹

The Fall Guy is basically a romantic comedy for men, and I guess that’s why it didn’t fully catch on.² About half of the character dynamics in this story amount to 1) we want to see Jody and Colt get together and 2) the things that keep them from getting together are funny. That’s, in theory, the engine of much rom-com writing. This is a very witty film, maybe writer Drew Pearce’s best work.

As for the action thriller side of it, it’s just really, really, good, with top-notch stunt after top-notch stunt. Vehicles, in-universe movie props, things for characters to desperately hang off of and onto, animals, and a propane tank all get involved in the chaos as Colt tries to survive double crosses and expose the culprits. Despite my using the word “chaos,” everything is very legible and well lit. David Leitch, director of this film, is one of the people who convinced 2010s filmmakers to abandon the Jason Bourne-inspired “shaky-cam and quick-cutting” style that was popular in the 2000s, so this is expected. Vulture magazine, in their annual stunt awards, nominated The Fall Guy for Best Stunt in an Action Film, Best Vehicular Stunt (twice!), Best Aerial Stunt, Best Practical Explosion, Best Overall Action Film, and Best Achievement in Stunts Overall (for stunt coordinator/stunt designer Chris O’Hara), which should give you a sense of how accomplished this movie is at staging its stunts. It didn’t win in any category, (Furiosa was stiff competition, deservedly so) but still, it’s something.³

On the theme front, this is one of the dreaded movies-about-movies. There’s a bunch of satire at the expense of money-grubbing movie producers and vain actors. My favourite thing about The Fall Guy is how it parodies big-budget sci-fi films: Jody is directing a weird, deeply silly hybrid of Avatar, Cowboys and Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Dune, and all of the characters inexplicably think the in-universe movie is terrific, which just makes it funnier. More earnestly, there’s a flat-out didactic (not in a bad way) message about stunt people deserving more respect, which makes sense coming from former stuntman Leitch. A montage in the credits showing us the movie’s own stunt performers hammers this message home further. This is not the deepest film out there as far as gender relations are concerned, but it believes men should be open with their significant others about their experiences and feelings, and also that women can afford to forgive men for their mistakes.

Early 2020s Hollywood put out a lot of action comedies in the Romancing the Stone vein where the deuteragonist is also the love interest (Free Guy, Jungle Cruise, The Lost City, etc.). The Fall Guy is the one I liked best. That’s got to be partly because its film industry self-satire overlapped with my interests, but I also just genuinely think it’s well-written, well-shot, and well-performed.⁴

1. I have not seen the show.

2. Critics loved this movie, and it seems to have done well on VOD, but it didn’t attract enough theatregoers to make a profit. It seemed to me at the time that the movie was aiming for a working class audience (Universal’s ad copy calls Colt “this working-class hero”) but attracted urban professionals instead. Twice as many Americans and Canadians went to see Bad Boys 4 as went to see The Fall Guy.

3. The Fall Guy has actually won a lot of awards for its stunts, via the Actors Awards, the Taurus World Stunt Awards, and the film critics’ associations of many American cities.

4. If you want to compare The Fall Guy to other movies, it might actually be more productive to compare it with the terrific 2016 detective/conspiracy action comedy The Nice Guys, which shares a star with this movie and is also a movie-about-movies of sorts. They have very different senses of humour and very different things to say about the film industry, but they feel like they go together anyway.