The actor is fantastic as a brazen stuntman in David Leitch’s most recent scary action film The Fall Guy, and Emily Blunt is fantastic as a character who doesn’t get enough screen time.
In The Fall Guy, Ryan Gosling plays a charmer who never seems to stop, much like an animated rabbit. He lunges, leaps, stumbles, strikes, and soars through the air. In order to play Colt Seavers, a stuntman with a long list of successes, six-packs on six-packs, and no regard for personal safety, the actor gave aside his “Barbie” pretty-in-pink look and occasionally sensual motions. Colt is having a typical workday until he jumps out of a building’s entryway twelve stories up and nearly hits the ground.
Silly Nonsense from The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch, is a cleverly ridiculous film about a man who only wants to get beaten up repeatedly. It’s funny. Colt has a horrific injury shortly after the film opens, which could be interpreted as a metaphor for the issues facing contemporary manhood. More precisely, it’s a long action highlight reel with romance, a hint of mystery, wink-wink humour, and the same conceited pride in filmmaking that moviegoers have had for nearly as long as motion pictures have existed. This brazen behaviour is sometimes well-deserved.
This movie is just a platform for Ryan Gosling and a host of other stunt performers to showcase their amazing talents, so the story is kind of irrelevant. It was created by Drew Pearce and loosely inspired on the Lee Majors-starring 1980s TV series of the same name. It starts moments before Colt’s 12-story fall goes horribly awry.
After recovering for a while by himself and baring his torso, he goes back to stunt work, drawn by the chance to see his former partner Jody (a lovely, if underutilised, Emily Blunt). With elements from basic computer games, the 2011 fantasy “Cowboys & Aliens,” and both the “Alien” and “Mad Max” series, she’s directing a science-fiction movie that looks like a regular big-screen recycling bin. Now for the scheming and brawling.
Leitch is a former stunt performer with an excellent background that includes double for Brad Pitt, the film “Bullet Train” director afterwards. Along with Chad Stahelski, a former stunt performer who is now a director best known for Keanu Reeves’ “John Wick” series, Leitch co-founded a business. In the post-John Woo era, the two directors have left their mark on American action cinema with a blend of martial-arts styles, clever fight choreography, and, most importantly, a focus on the various ways a human body can move (or hurtle) through space. They have worked with physically expressive actors like Pitt, Reeves, and Charlize Theron (Leitch directed “Atomic Blonde“).
The Impact of Action Sequences in Leitch’s Films
There are gun arsenals and various sharp objects that may inflict terrible injuries throughout Leitch’s flicks, including ‘The Fall Guy’. But the physical strength of the action scenes—with their precise body twisting, jerking, and straining—is what grabs your attention in both this and earlier Leitch and Stahelski productions. It makes sense that both directors emphasise the amazing labour that goes into these physical acts given their backgrounds. (They display their entire body, akin to Fred Astaire.) In these films, you can hear people panting and watch people grimacing when fists, feet, and other objects—like refrigerator doors, briefcases, and bottles—make contact with hard heads and sensitive flesh.
Similar to ‘The Fall Guy’s’ flashy real effects, this focus on the body reads as a critique of the computer magic that now shapes action pictures. In The Fall Guy, Colt’s (or the movie’s) fall to Earth reveals both his and the truth of the story. actual guys pulling actual stunts gives this a manly undertone that balances the way his romance with Jody is portrayed, which alternates between being romantic, funny, and sometimes frustrating. One example of this is the use of split-screen mirroring à la “Pillow Talk.” Even though Jody is Colt’s manager, he has to save the day because of a dubious contract he made with a producer and celebrity (Hannah Waddingham and Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
In a strange way, the narrative interweaves a subplot about a deep fake with a scene when Colt’s face is digitally scanned to explore the issue of authenticity. (If you ignore how existentially stressful the topic of artificial intelligence was during the 2023 actors’ strike, it’s hilarious).
Going full Tom Cruise, Gosling makes love to the camera and does some of his own jaw-dropping stunts, like stopping and nearly going under a rolling garbage truck. As ‘The Fall Guy’ is a celebration of stunt work, it is only fitting to note that the actor’s driving duplicate was Logan Holladay, his nosebleed of a fall was Troy Brown, and his stunt doubles were Ben Jenkin and Justin Eaton. Well done, gentlemen.
