Maybe they should have called it The SUMMER Guy, amirite?

A Review of the Recent Fall Guy Movie

There are spoilers in this article and they are central to the novel argument Luke is making. If you want to avoid them, I’ve included a Corridor Crew video featuring David Leitch talking about his work on the film at the end of the post. — Editor: Christian Lindke

The Known Stuntman

Generally speaking, I'm a fan of what I'm going to call “Soul Vomit” movies: two-hour-plus epics in which the director clearly vomited up his id and everything in it on the screen. When it all clicks, as in Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid or David Lynch's Lost Highway, it's some of the greatest cinema ever. When it partly clicks, like Damien Chazelle's Babylon, it can still be wildly, insanely fun. Let's just say I never expected David Leitch to do it with The Fall Guy.

The Fall Guy was an '80s action show that I didn't much like at the time. I was into high concepts and sci-fi twists: shows like Riptide, Blue Thunder, The A*Team, The Greatest American Hero, as opposed to what I'll call “handsome hero” action shows in which the lead actor's appeal to women was a key part of the hook: Lee Majors, David Hasselhoff, the Simon and Simon guys, and so forth. Ironically, I've come to love those guys as they aged, especially if they embraced a degree of camp and self-parody, as most have. But as a kid, sex-appeal stuff was just an annoying distraction to me (Magnum P.I. was an exception, partly because of Higgins, and partly because Magnum felt more like dad material). I was Team Spock, not Kirk.

When I did watch The Fall Guy, it was mostly to mock it – in this show about a stuntman who's also a bounty hunter, bad guys' cars would practically explode on impact, but Colt Seavers' truck could get knocked off a cliff and have a load of lumber dumped on it, and Lee Majors would simply dust himself off and walk out of the vehicle. It also boasts an all-time terrible theme song in “The Unknown Stuntman,” up there with Buck Rogers' “Far Beyond the Stars,” that nowadays plays as so camp it's good, but back then just sounded awful next to cool shit like the Miami Vice theme. (Miami Vice itself was off-limits to me, deemed far too violent for children. I imagined Friday the 13^th levels of gore in it, based on the way moms talked.)

It was inevitable that somebody would try to revive The Fall Guy, and stuntman-turned-director David Leitch must have seemed an inevitable choice. It's perhaps less inevitable that he ignored everything about the property except the existence of a stuntman named Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) and a love interest named Jody (Emily Blunt). They're not a team, she's not a stunt person, and there's no sidekick Howie, nor is Colt a bounty hunter. He's a soft-spoken guy who's just really nice and professional, which I strongly suspect is how Leitch sees himself. He's in love/lust with Jody, who is initially a camerawoman, but promoted to director before the first act is done.

Movie Colt suffers a back-breaking accident, and becomes a recluse, only to be lured back to work a year and a half later when he hears that director Jody asked for him specifically. By the time he gets on location in Australia, he finds out that's a lie – but before he can do much about it he gets framed for murder. He becomes an action hero on the side because circumstances force it, and his stunt skills can indeed get him out of a few jams.

When it comes to the action sequences, Leitch includes both standard stunt sequences and their inherent dangers, and preposterous movie action moments in which stuntman Colt finds himself in real dangerous chases and fights. Bizarrely, a masterfully staged car chase keeps getting interrupted by Jody singing “Against All Odds” at a karaoke bar, thinking (wrongly) that Colt has blown her off and gone home. Thematically it makes some sense – she's hurting inside, he's literally getting hurt at the same time – but it deflates the building tension and momentum in the action, while specifically referencing a whole different '80s movie. I'm reminded more of the scene in Chasing Amy where Ben Affleck is learning about his girlfriend's sexual past, interspersed with hockey players getting hit. Like, I get what the metaphor is supposed to be, but it plays like a dumb-guy version of it, when in each case I'd rather see the director doing his best stuff – the stunts for Leitch, the dialogue for Smith.

Where things get interesting is in the villain reveal. It turns out Seavers' injury and framing was at the hands of Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who pointedly looks like Logan Paul and talks and laughs like Tom Cruise. Ryder boasts about doing all his own stunts, yet he actually doesn't, and in the climax, is shown to be absolutely terrified of the kind of thing he supposedly bravely does on the reg. Paul's currently getting a lot of praise from wrestling fans for doing dangerous moves in a handful of matches a year, while Cruise's claims of doing everything for real are the primary hooks for his successful action films these days. The Ryder character feels like a way to accuse both of being phony grandstanders without actually, literally calling them out in any legally actionable way. His actions are also covered up by crooked producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), who feels like a composite of any and every producer dismissive of the stunt team's input.

One can't claim with certainty to mind-read a director, but if The Fall Guy isn't Leitch's middle-finger to every difficult, unprofessional coworker he's ever had in Hollywood, it sure feels that way. Jody isn't as nasty a character, but a scene in which she vindictively forces Colt to do retake after retake of a scene that sets him on fire feels like it might be based on something that actually happened. Oddly, the film also seems like it might kind of hate Jody, despite making her a desirable love interest. After everything the characters go through, her magnum opus, important-for-women directorial debut looks exactly like Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon. Now, stunt people whom I've talked to actually like working with Snyder, so that may be meant as a compliment, but given Rebel Moon's reception, it doesn't feel like one.

Another thing: this movie assumes that its audience knows what “Hall H” means, so much so that it's thrice used as a punchline. Does anyone outside of the segment of Film Twitter that actually attends Comic-Con have a clue? What about the average middle-aged dad who grew up liking Lee Majors?

For the first half hour or so, I started to get the sinking feeling one gets as the realization a movie at hand might not be good sinks in. “Is this really a bad movie?” I wondered. Could Leitch have let me down that much? A virtuoso fight scene on hallucinogens started to win me back, the reveal of Ryder as the villain felt spot-on (Cruise and Paul are not high on my list of esteem, either), and by the end, the movie sent me home happy. But boy, is the tone and quality all over the place. Leitch could have made a semi-autobiography about what it's like to be a stuntman; he could have just made a balls-out action comedy; he could have remade the TV show; or he could have made a huge sarcastic in-joke. He has tried to do all of that in one action epic. It's not cohesive, but it sure has its moments.

Does Leitch know there's already a movie called Metalstorm? Is he aware “High Noon at the edge of the universe” was Outland's marketing pitch? Are these supposed to be in-jokes? I've no idea. I also think it misses the point of “The Unknown Stuntman” to remove all the gratuitous name-dropping and getting an actual good singer to cover it.

I do, however, think Leitch most likely made exactly the movie he wanted to make, rather than anything the studio might have expected. Even with mixed results, we need more of this.

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Mostly Spoiler Free Reaction Video

Bonus Section Added by the Editor for those who don’t like spoilers.