The Fall Guy

The Weight of the Fall

Lately I’ve started to wonder if we’ve forgotten how to simply watch a movie. Too often it feels like we’re sitting there with a spreadsheet running in our heads, sorting through lore, continuity, and franchise math instead of letting a story hit us. Blockbusters have become weirdly solemn things. Then *The Fall Guy* comes crashing in with a lopsided grin and asks a much healthier question: do you want to watch a car flip eight and a half times?

It absolutely delivers on that. It even set a Guinness World Record for the most cannon rolls in a vehicle. But that’s not really why David Leitch’s 2024 action-rom-com works. The movie clicks because it understands how bruising it can feel to do dangerous, invisible work and hope someone finally notices.



Leitch comes out of the stunt world himself. He doubled for Brad Pitt in *Fight Club*; he was one of the people taking the hit so somebody else could look invincible. You can feel that lived-in respect all over this movie. He shoots stunt work with real affection, but never in a dainty way. Early on, Ryan Gosling’s Colt Seavers—coming back after an injury that nearly ended his career—has to perform a 12-story free fall, and Gosling actually did it. The fun of the scene is in the way fear leaks through Colt’s attempt to act unbothered. He locks up a little on the ledge. His mouth tightens. He hides behind the sunglasses like calm is just another part of the costume. It’s a very funny bit of physical acting, but it also tells you exactly who this guy is.

The movie’s pulse, though, is the mess between Colt and Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), his ex and now the first-time director of a giant sci-fi film. Honestly, I could have watched two hours of just those two trying to work around their breakup while a production keeps moving around them. There’s a terrific stretch where Jody makes Colt repeat a fire-burn stunt again and again while using a megaphone to publicly autopsy their failed relationship. Blunt plays it with this wonderfully controlled sweetness. Her posture stays perfect, her voice stays smooth, and meanwhile Gosling is out there literally on fire, absorbing the physical punishment because he knows he’s earned the emotional version.



I’m less convinced by where the back half goes. Drew Pearce’s script eventually peels away from the movie-set romance and turns Colt into an amateur detective hunting for a missing, obnoxiously famous action star played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who nails the preening idiot routine. The machinery of that plot feels pretty worn-out. Barry Hertz at *The Globe and Mail* wrote that the film is "bizarrely determined to throw its heavenly match" by keeping Gosling and Blunt apart for too much of the third act, and that’s exactly the problem. Once the movie swaps that screwball friction for a generic conspiracy, some of the juice disappears.

But I can only complain so much when the action still hits this hard. It’s practical, heavy, noisy. You feel the cables. You hear the crashes. It’s all fake, of course, but it’s fake in a way that still asks something from actual bodies.



At bottom, *The Fall Guy* is about the dignity of being the person just outside the spotlight. Gosling has gotten very good at playing this flavor of earnest, lovable loser—from Ken in *Barbie* to Colt here—and he wears it easily. When Colt flashes that trademark thumbs-up after a wreck, the smile barely covers how beat-up he is. He’s sore, he’s exhausted, and all he really wants is the girl. If that means being hurled through another wall, fine. In a blockbuster landscape full of digital floatiness, there’s something unexpectedly touching about watching a human body really absorb the blow.