Barbenheimer forever! Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling set aside their differences culturally to team up in this action comedy film welcoming 2024 to summer. That summertime excitement exists all over The Fall Guy, a labor of love everyone involved was happy to participate in in order to give shine to maybe the most underappreciated people working in movies today: the stuntmen. The one group that can stop Ken and Kitty from fighting and make a badass action flick.
Gosling is playing one of those stuntmen in The Fall Guy, Colt Seavers. Colt’s got it good at the beginning: he’s lead stunt guy for hunky leading man Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and dating up and coming camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). But the good times go bad quickly after an on set accident sends poor Colt into isolation, alienating everyone in his life. Eager to make things up to Jody, Colt gets sucked back into her orbit by producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), who needs the expendable Colt to try to find a missing Ryder, who’s got in with some bad people.
David Leitch never forgot where he came from. He used all of his clout in Hollywood to make an entire movie about the brilliance of stuntpeople. That’s right: forget plot or anything else, this movie is really a love letter to those people in the background, getting set on fire, thrown against a rock, and then told to do it again because the lead actor doesn’t understand the motivation for his character’s face in the scene after. Every 20-30 minutes, Leitch finds some incredible new way to show why the people who execute stunts deserve our respect and admiration. Whether by air, by land, by sea, by sword, or by gun, or by dog, the director purposefully shoots this movie showing his Gosling doubles doing incredible things that make the audience “ooh” “aah” and “whoaa” their way through this film. This all culminates in the big finale, a movie within a movie that’s a stunt action spectacle sparing no expense with its death defying sequences, all to simply to bring joy to audiences everywhere and get no credit for it whatsoever. The Fall Guy’s legacy hopefully will be something akin to the Dark Knight: a shame spiral to Hollywood brass to insert “Best Stunts” FINALLY as an Oscars category.
With Leitch really focused on letting his stunt teams cook, he relies on Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt to carry the bare bones husk of a movie he’s saddled them with. For a movie that doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for leading actor types, Gosling and Blunt really try to break that stigma by giving the film the charm and good looks it needs in service of these background players. Gosling in particular has to be a lot of things: Taylor Swift emotionally bare, chiseled badass, romcom hottie, and butt of the joke, which only a select few would be willing to put themselves on the line for. He and Blunt have decent fun together, giving each other sh*t. And this type of romcom queen role Blunt can play in her sleep, always with the upper hand but secretly pining for the happy ending.
If I ever took stunt teams for granted, after The Fall Guy, I definitely won’t again. If anything, I’m going to be looking out for them in every great action film I see. Without them, the great action films I love: The Matrix, The Fugitive, Die Hard, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Raid, Mad Max: Fury Road, none of them would have been nearly as exciting and memorable. So props to former stuntman David Leitch: convincing a studio to give him $150 mil to completely sideline Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, and Sydney Australia to showcase all the nameless, faceless, selfless supporting actors behind the scenes making everyone else look good. It might be career suicide, but it’s the right thing to do. That, and putting a unicorn in an action film.