The Fall Guy review – Thumbs up!

When The Fall Guy opened in cinemas two weekends ago, its box office debut was a bit of damp squib. This is unfortunately par for the course for action director extraordinaire David Leitch. While he is co-creator of the wildly successful genre gold standard John Wick, and his franchise work – Deadpool 2 and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw – were huge blockbusters, his original productions – Atomic Blonde and Bullet Train – have struggled with commercial success, even when they earned strong reviews. And now The Fall Guy appears to be suffering the same fate, which is a crying shame as it’s a hugely entertaining action-romcom romp that makes for the perfect big screen date night.

To add insult to injury, The Fall Guy is technically a franchise entry, as Leitch and writer Drew Pearce took inspiration from the mostly forgotten 1980s TV series of the same name, starring Lee Majors as a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter. 2024’s The Fall Guy is a very loose “reboot” though, with star Ryan Gosling’s iteration of lead character Colt Seavers still a highly skilled stuntman. He’s definitely no bounty hunter though.

After suffering a devastating injury due to a stunt gone wrong, Colt cut all ties with the filmmaking world, including his camerawomen girlfriend, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). One year later, he’s eking out a miserable living in Hollywood when a surprising call from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) draws him back into the industry.

Jody is getting her big break as a director on a blockbuster project starring Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the world’s biggest action star, for whom Colt was the stunt double for many years. However, Tom has gone missing after falling in with an unsavoury crowd, and his disappearance threatens to shutter production if the studio financing the film gets wind of it. Gail whisks Colt to the set in Australia to assist with both finishing the film’s major action sequences and tracking down the missing Tom. It’s Colt’s chance to save Jody’s filmmaking dream from crashing and burning before it even gets started. Except nobody has told Jody about any of this.

Cue action, comedy, romance, and a whole lot of movie magic for the people who love the magic behind movies. If you are the type of person who read the opening line of this review and knew what a “damp squib” was, The Fall Guy is especially for you. Throughout the film, Leitch and co. highlight the incredible behind-the-scenes wizardry that goes into making the movies we love – that dangerous work, as in the case of stunt performers, mostly going unheralded by the likes of the Oscars.

There’s also a constant meta throughline as Blunt’s Jody fights back against producers who want to do everything with post-production VFX, while she wants to shoot her film – an absurd sci-fi-western-romance-epic titled Metalstorm – with real performers and tactile effects. All of that is mirrored by Leitch’s steady cinematography and measured editing here, which takes pains to show that it’s actually Gosling and the cast doing a lot of the stunt work themselves in the film’s many practical action sequences.

That said, the film’s greatest practical effect is actually its two stars. Gosling and Blunt dial up the chemistry to max whenever they are together, whether they’re working through the heartbreak of their past romance or rekindling their synced-up working relationship. As their reunion goes doesn’t go quite as Colt expected, it means that even when there’s no pyrotechnics on screen, there’s always figurative fireworks, keeping the film’s two-hour runtime brisk and breezy.

It’s Gosling, in particular, who is a charisma machine here. He’s just electric with whomever he shares the screen (special mention going to the aforementioned Waddingham, and Winston Duke as Colt’s best friend and stunt coordinator, Dan). The actor has been on a run of great roles for a few years now, but Colt Seavers may just be Gosling’s best yet for how it lets him deliver on every level. His charm is so effortless its supernatural, his comic timing is impeccable, and he is just the perfect mix of goofball and action hero as Colt comically discovers that all the amazing physical skills he’s acquired over the years don’t always work so well when somebody is actually trying to kill you in the real world.

If there’s any criticism to be made about The Fall Guy it’s that Leitch occasionally doesn’t frame the action for maximum awe and effect, resulting in a handful of the bigger stunts appearing smaller than they actually are. Luckily, a behind-the-scenes reel that plays out during the film’s end credits showcases just how insanely good the film’s stunt performers actually were as they put their bodies on the line to achieve these showstopping sequences. On the flip side, there is some film-within-a-film silliness when it comes to how the stunts in Jody’s Metalstorm are haphazardly thrown together, in comparison to the obviously meticulous staging of The Fall Guy’s set pieces.

These fumbles, along with a couple of iffy plot points, are easy to overlook though. Simply put, The Fall Guy is a riot. Even when it’s got something noteworthy to say about the film industry, or Colt has to go through a bit of character drama, it’s never weighty or preachy. Leitch, Gosling, and Blunt are here to entertain us, whether that be by launching themselves from moving cars onto helicopters, or sizzling with romantic alchemy, and they succeed uproariously.

As things stand currently on the box office side, The Fall Guy isn’t close to making back its $150 million budget. However, there’s been a tiny glimmer of hope this past weekend, so maybe the scrappy flick can get back up again after taking a huge fall, just like its titular character. And given how good Gosling is here, the idea of The Fall Guy becoming successful enough for some more screen time with Colt Seavers gets a very enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

The Fall Guy is in South African cinemas now, having released on 26 April.