The Fall Guy plus Short Takes on some various other cinematic topics of possible interest
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
The Fall Guy (David Leitch) rated PG-13 126 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), stunt double for movie star/action hero Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), romantically linked to camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt)—who yearns to direct—is badly injured when a stunt goes wrong, seemingly ending his career and his love life as he rejects Jody’s attempts at comfort. 18 months later he’s a Mexican restaurant parking valet, gets a call from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) to come to Sydney, Australia where Jody’s directing a sci-fi epic, Metalstorm. Under the impression Jody wants him in the crew he goes, only to find her angry, doesn’t want to work with him at all until stunt coordinator Dan Tucker (Winston Duke) says they have no choice given the time constraints, so she tolerates his presence, revealing in a dialogue with him about an upcoming scene that the script—focused on the difficult relationship between an alien and a human—has inferences of her fiery frustration with Colt.
However, the movie’s focus shifts when Gail tells Colt the true reason she recruited him is Tom’s been missing for a couple of days; she desperately needs to get him back in action because the movie’s already over budget so it needs to get finished, especially with her sense it could be a big hit helping stabilize her career rather than facing the negative result of the production being shut down. Colt doesn’t want Jody’s directorial-debut to be ruined so he goes on the hunt for Tom, starting with a visit to his apartment where he’s attacked by Tom’s girlfriend, Iggy (Teresa Palmer), until they finally stop pounding on each other. Next, he’s off to a nightclub to meet with Doone (Matuse), a drug dealer who supposedly was mixed up with Tom, resulting in an attack by Doone’s goons who Tom manages to fight off single-handedly; Doone tells Colt of a hotel room Tom was using, so Colt goes there, finds a dead man on ice in the bathtub, but when he gets police to go with him to the room the tub’s empty. On the movie set, Jody’s beginning to warm up to Colt again (there’s also a scene where she phones him, they discuss using split-screen in the movie, cleverly shot as split-screen as they talk to each other), yet his focus is on finding Tom so he recruits the star’s production assistant, Alma Milan (Stephanie Hsu), to help him find Tom’s phone, which results in a wild chase through the streets of Sydney as thugs are after the phone as well. After eluding his pursuers, Colt has the phone, goes with Dan to Tom’s apartment, finds the passcode for the phone, but they’re shocked, to see a video on the device where Tom’s bragging about doing his own stunts, then accidently kills his new stuntman, Henry Herrera (can’t find him listed in the credits)—the dead guy in the icy bathtub.
More goons arrive; in the ensuing shootout the phone’s damaged, Dan gets away, Colt escapes by jumping off the roof onto a yacht where he’s stunned to find Tom but taken captive at gunpoint. Colt’s tied up so Tom tells him how he’s worked with Gail to get Colt into the mix so Colt can be accused of killing Henry, then dying himself via suicide, allowing Tom to come out of hiding to finish the movie—he also tells Colt he arranged the long-ago accident because he felt his stuntman was getting too famous at Tom’s expense. Just as Colt’s about to be set on fire after being doused with gasoline he manages to break free, escape to a small boat which he maneuvers through Sydney harbor (his hands still tied behind him!) while being chased by more thugs (Tom seems to have a small army). Colt finally gets his hands free, continues to speed away from attackers until his boat meets a fiery end as Colt escapes again. He calls Jody, tells her what’s going on with Tom and Gail, then sneaks onto the set the next day disguised in an alien costume. Tom has returned, makes his grand speech at story’s end, thinks the production’s now done until Jody says she needs him for a few shots in a car to later be enhanced with computer graphics (by this time, Gail’s released an altered copy of the Henry-killing-video with Colt’s face deepfaked onto Tom’s body so it does seem he was the murderer, yet he’s also supposed to be dead based on news footage of the flaming boat).
⇒Once Tom’s in the car, Colt jumps in, drives off in a breakneck manner, forces Tom to admit the scheme with Gail, his voice sent through a secret microphone in his costume to a recording location. Tom’s goons try to intervene but are stopped by Dan and the rest of the crew, yet Gail gets to the location of the recording, takes the device at gunpoint, then she and Tom fly off in a helicopter, but Colt manages to jump onto its undercarriage, get into the ‘copter cabin, punch out Tom and Gail, take the device with the incriminating recording (necessary, as the original video of Tom and Henry was previously destroyed), jumps to safety as the helicopter crashes taking out Tom and Gail. Later, the movie premieres but with Jason Momoa now as the lead (apparently his image was deepfaked over Tom’s previous scenes), Colt’s been exonerated and is back with Jody, the movie’s a big hit. In an interlude during the credits Gail and Tom are on the verge of being arrested when he runs away into a field of pyrotechnics where he’s blown up, leading Stephanie to call Jason Mamoa’s agent.⇐
So What? This movie was inspired by an ABC TV series of the same name (1981-’86) where Lee Majors played Colt as a stuntman, also worked as a bounty hunter aided by a few others including stuntwoman Jody Banks (Heather Thomas). Certainly this new version is intended as a love song to the unsung men and women who put their lives on the line so stunning action scenes can be filmed, Hollywood stars can appear to be death-defying daredevils without risking their own bodies in the process—although director Leitch, himself an experienced stunt-double, notes Gosling did some of his own stunts, even as this article is one of the few I’ve seen that acknowledges the actual stuntmen used in this movie, which becomes ironic given it’s intended to honor all of the true “fall guys” (and “gals”), yet very few critics give any specific credit to the men who made Gosling’s Cole Seavers look like the I’m-only-human (but just barely) version of a superhero. In the Los Angeles Times article just noted, along with this one from the other side of the continent in The New York Times, we get details on how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences keeps teasing the possibility of adding an Oscar category for stuntwork, yet so far nothing tangible has emerged. But, whatever the Academy may decide to do in the future (they have announced that in 2026 they’ll add a category for Best Casting Director), it’s my job now to make some pronouncement on this movie which I don’t find to be as easy as I initially thought it would be. Sure, if the story’s about a stuntman trying to regain a sense of command of his skills (along with the woman he pushed away, afraid she’d see him as he saw himself during his dark days as a “failure) there would need to be a lot of jaw-dropping stunts in this script, including episodes of hand-to-hand-combat, but as a viewer do I feel there’s much else going on here in addition to a packed-catalogue of the amazing activities?
On the one hand, what we see on screen here is well-conceived for what it’s trying to accomplish and gives us a solid sense of how these scenes are shot in series such as those about extraordinary heroes like James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt (concerning the Mission: Impossible narratives [1996-2023; most recently directed by Christopher McQuarrie, previously by Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird; pulled in over $4 billion worldwide so far] we do have the situation of Tom Cruise doing most—if not all—of his own stunts [many of them enormously dangerous], making him a nasty contrast to Tom Ryder in The Fall Guy who sees himself as likewise talented but seemingly never has the courage to prove it), yet on the other hand … Guy just uses a thin plot to generate ongoing situations needing to be resolved with gaudy theatrics so we seldom get a chance to rest from one intense confrontation (man vs. machine or man vs. lots of other dangerous men) to the next, although there are useful warnings within this story about the dangers of assuming truth based on the evidence of deepfakes along with a quick plea for the Academy to give Oscar recognition to the fantastic work of stuntpeople who are so crucial to so many big-budget (hopefully, big success) cinematic attempts to satisfy audiences saturated with extreme graphics of video games. When I put all of this into full-ponder-mode, I come up with my barely-embraced-3½ stars rating, which is further aided by the presence of Gosling, Blunt, and Waddington for me, some of my favorites from all their previous work I’ve seen. This movie’s obviously a personal tribute from the director to a craft he feels is too-often-underrated by both the industry and audiences, a reality noted bluntly in my choice below of a Musical Metaphor, so unless you’re just put off with what’s primarily an assault of slam-bang-action (at least there’s not too much death involved in the process), I think you’d find ... Guy to be at least somewhat fascinating to watch or maybe even a fully-blown pleasure.
Bottom Line Final Comments: The CCAL’s solidly behind you seeing The Fall Guy, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at a healthy 81% while the Metacritic average score is 73% (about as high as they normally get for anything both they and I have reviewed so far this year), which has been in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters since May 3, 2024 (down from its high of 4,008 of them, but still in 2,410 if you’re COVID-resistant enough to join a crowd), having taken at this time $85 million ($165.5 million globally), but if you—like me—prefer to turn to streaming you’ll find $19.99 rentals available at Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and a few other platforms, so decide if the premise here is enticing enough to fork over that much cash, watch away if you choose to do so. I think I’ve now covered what I can of the nuances (what little there are) and the intended impact of The Fall Guy. (Although if you’d prefer another choice that also features a movie star [Leonardo DiCaprio] and his stuntman [Brad Pitt] but gets into considerably more plot moves while also rewriting history concerning the Charles Manson Family murders, then you should look into Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood [Quentin Tarantino, 2019; 4 stars review in our August 1, 2019 posting, where I chose to use the alternate title version without the promotional inserted periods]; plus, it has a much cheaper rental, under $4 [free on Hulu, if you don’t mind the ad interruptions].)
Or, maybe you’d like to get (re)aquainted with the TV show that inspired our current movie; if so, you could start with its opening credits theme song, “Unknown Stuntman,” sung by star Lee Majors where this version of Cole Seavers says (each week): "I die for a living' in the movies and TV / But the hardest thing I ever do is watch my leading lades / Kiss some other guy while I'm bandaging my knee." In the process the song name-checks Farrah Fawcett, Sally Field, Bo Derek, Robert Redford, Cheryl Tiegs, Raquel Welch, and Clint Eastwood (I also found some lyrics for it that add Jacqueline Smith and Burt Reynolds), a tune which was a bit rewritten to drop out all the name-dropping, then sung by Blake Shelton in the new movie, under the final credits, although with the earlier version you can take a 5-minute trip back to the 1980s, so you’ve now got options of what you want to watch and which decade you’d prefer to invest your psyche in (see how valuable it is to dwell in the realm of Film Reviews from Two Guys in the Dark; there's no need for applause, just send lots of money).
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
Some options for you: (1) IMDb's list of notable summer movies; (2) What's new on Netflix in June 2024; (3) What's new on Amazon Prime Video in June 2024; (4) What's new on Max in June 2024; (5) What's new on Disney+ in June 2024; and (6) What's new on Hulu in June 2024.
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