The Fall Guy

It’s not uncommon for directors to have a “this one’s personal” story they want to tell, though more often than not it’s a first film, not a fifth. Well, sixth, if you count 2014’s John Wick, which David Leitch co-directed with creative partner Chad Stahelski, but DGA rules meant only one of the two former stuntmen could get official directing credit. Since then, Leitch – who started out as Brad Pitt’s stunt double – has directed a steady clip of action films, including Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Bullet Train, that can be entertaining as hell but exhausting in their jokey-jokey glibness. Leitch’s latest, The Fall Guy – a joyful gong announcing the summer movie season’s arrival – still delivers jokes, but this one’s all heart.

A lesson in how to lightly mine IP, The Fall Guy (from a script by Drew Pearce) pulls a title character, a loose concept, a couple cameos, and a theme song (“Unknown Stuntman,” re-recorded here by Blake Shelton) from the original 1980s ABC series starring Lee Majors, and pretty much discards the rest. Ryan Gosling plays stuntman Colt Seavers, the regular double for Tom Ryder (Taylor-Johnson), a preening megastar who likes to brag that he does all his own stunts. (“Less face!” Tom hisses at Colt when he thinks his double is hogging the limelight.) During production on a sci-fi action epic called Metal Storm – the passion project of Colt’s ex, first-time director Jody (Blunt), for whom Colt still holds a mighty torch – Tom goes missing, and Colt is tasked to hunt down the missing leading man and save his best girl’s production from going down in flames.

The Fall Guy wings back and forth between the off-set passel of trouble Colt stumbles into on his search for the MIA Tom and on location with Metal Storm, where we watch stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke) and an army of below-the-line pros assemble jaw-dropping practical effects. (There’s a charming sequence, edited with Tommy-gun pacing, where Jody works through her past relationship trauma by setting Colt on fire repeatedly, ostensibly to get the shot right but really to burn him back for all the heartbreak he caused.) I suppose you could call The Fall Guy’s panorama of “real” / “not real” stunts meta – and sure, add another layer with the closing credits’ behind-the-scenes reel of real stuntpeople pulling off fictional stuntpeople’s stunts, a film-within-a-film-within-a-film. But “meta” implies something far headier than The Fall Guy’s heart-on-sleeve ambition to be a love letter to the stunt community. On that it succeeds beautifully, and the PG-13 rating – dramatically dialing down Leitch’s usual blood squib budget – means the message gets broadcast to a broader audience.

How broad? Romantic-comedy fans should flock to this thing. The genre is so moribund, at least theatrically, that an emphatically meh film like Anyone But You broke box office records, so hungry was the base for any fresh meat. The Fall Guy is ribeye compared to that film’s ground round, even if the rom-com beats are smuggled into the main directive of big action. Bouncy with enthusiasm and freely tapping their generous reserves of movie-star charisma, Gosling and Blunt perfectly embody the rhetorical question at the heart of this genuinely tender ode to the industry and its undersung practitioners: Aren’t movies the best?

They really are.

Read Richard Whittaker's SXSW 2024 interview with director David Leitch and producer Kelly McCormick