I’ll give David Leitch this: I completely agree with the thesis of his new and vaguely semi-autobiographical film The Fall Guy, which is supposedly based on the Lee Majors-led TV show from the ‘80s but more informed by the various paths that Leitch’s career has branched into. Ask any member of a crew after three or four beers and a hefty amount of frustration about their own issues at work — and they’ll tell you that stuntmen are, perhaps, the most genuinely underappreciated members of any production outside of PAs and assistants (as in the ones working with talent and production leads), who don’t even receive the most basic of honorifics from their peers in the industry at annual awards ceremonies. Even fans have been better represented at the Oscars than the people who help make all the crazy action you see on screen possible, and there wouldn’t be any Speed Force for the Flash to enter if it weren’t for the gaggle of set pieces, stacked with stunts, there to entertain the viewer.
We can debate all day long as to why this is, but if you had to ask me for a real reason as to why this is, it’s a form of protectionism – the very concept of a “stunt man” is verisimilitude-shattering, and sometimes the suspension of disbelief really hangs on how similar a body double’s jaw-line when cross-cut with the familiar visage of a famous star. Studios craft PR images for their talent as much as they do the actual shots you see on screen, and we’ve come to measure an actor’s toughness by their willingness to take bumps, even if that desire is often initiated and encouraged by the star’s own experiences around stuntpeople. Keanu Reeves, Leitch’s former leading man, is a great example of this: his willingness to “do his own stunts” came from working with guys like Chad Stahelski on stunt-heavy features like The Matrix movies, and that collaboration ultimately paid off for the two of them, as well as Leitch, who owes his directorial career to John Wick.
Yet the ones who don’t, for whatever reason, decide to hurl themselves off of rooftops and mountaintops aren’t cowards – we wouldn’t think of an actor as a horseshit fake aesthete if they didn’t create their own lighting set-ups, after all – they simply trust that the professionals hired and vetted for these important roles will do their job better than they can. As time has gone on, their respect has only increased behind the scenes, no longer simply being anonymous casualties to be gossiped about in the aftermath of a failed stunt, but honest-to-god leads or co-performers in major motion pictures (Zoe Bell’s elevation to an actual leading woman is one of the truly good things Tarantino’s done for the industry), and having those actors who actually do their own stunts attest to just how fucking difficult the job is – Jackie Chan, for one, who gave me (and others like me) an introduction to stunt work in the form of a short comic in the back of a Disney Adventures at some point in the ‘90s – is, in a way, reputation-increasing in how it spotlights just how absurd and dangerous the feats the stunt crew is tasked with are to actually perform.
They come the closest to living out the fantastical films we enjoy and pay the price with little of the glory attached – the best intersection of performance art, athletics, and creativity that visual entertainment has to offer. Performance art is the thematic lens that we typically view their work through in other media, with the representation of their craft in narrative films often resembling the narrative of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist more than a highlight reel. The Stunt Man, Drive, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, etc. – all of these films emphasize the mystique and murkiness of the art, which are often as flattering as they are suspicious of their characters’ existential drive for entertainment through theoretical self-harm (and that’s to say nothing of the actual daredevils who took the language of Hollywood stunt work and applied it to big-top theatrics, many of whom, like Evel Knievel, could be legitimately be considered psychopaths).
Unlike the other directors who have simply made narratives about stunt people after watching them from afar or reading about their exploits over time, Leitch actually was a stuntman before he moved behind the camera and The Fall Guy’s lack of introspection about the job is a direct product of his experiences. That’s the key word, “job” – as David Foster Wallace once pointed out, ask any athlete to write about that game-winning touchdown, and you’ll get the banalest shit imaginable because that physical experience is almost unquantifiable in text, as oftentimes language just isn’t built for that kind of reflection – and Leitch’s film acts as a kind of proverbial stunt show wholly informed the yawning derring-do of a true professional. Hell, even our protagonist, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) got his start on the Miami Vice stunt show back in the day before graduating to the big leagues. By the film’s start, he’s spent the better part of two decades working in the industry, having become the stand-in for Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), one of Hollywood’s most popular stars, thanks to Colt’s friendship with Ryder’s overbearing, Diet Coke-slurping producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham).
Along the way, he falls in love with Jody (Emily Blunt), a camera assistant looking to eventually direct her own features, and it’s Jody he last talks to on the day that would change his life and potentially end his career. A routine stunt, a fall, in fact, goes horribly wrong, and Colt shatters his back after crashing to Earth ten stories down from a top-floor hotel walkway. A year and a half later, he’s mostly recovered and parking cars for a Mexican restaurant in LA when Gail asks him to return to work to double for Tom on a goofy space-western Tom’s starring in. He doesn’t want any part of that bullshit until he hears that Jody’s directing the film and has specifically asked for him.
A day later, he’s in Australia, and he’s ready, willing, and able to get back to work. But Jody’s not happy to see him – in fact, she never asked for Colt in the first place because he ghosted her after his accident in a blaze of incandescent self-pity. This would make for a pretty winning little rom-com, preserved just like this – Gosling and Blunt have fantastic chemistry together, and Drew Pearce’s script is often perfectly suited for the odd aloofness that Gosling has cultivated into a trademark – but because this is an action film from the maker of Hobbs and Shaw, it quickly becomes a murder-mystery. See, Tom’s gone missing, and Gail’s brought Colt in to try and find him, and after about an hour of set-up, the film’s true inciting incident, at least as far as the crime-adjacent section of the story is concerned, comes when Colt finds a dead body in a hotel room that Tom once spent the night hoovering lines and doing Krav Maga moves in, a body whose condition he’s inevitably blamed for.
This is, of course, where The Fall Guy gets its real meaning: Colt’s being set up and it’s up to him and what few friends he has left – mainly his stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke, charming as always) – to help clear his name and ensure that Jody’s movie makes it to a theater near you. If you’re beginning to see why The Fall Guy was a TV show, well, you’re probably foreseeing a long sit, which is what Leitch excels at – brevity is for stunts in his world, not for storytelling, and the movie is surprisingly long and laconically structured. It has four or five points in which it could end, before it keeps on trucking for another half-hour, grinding its way to another impressive stunt (that, depending on what angle you look at it from, may act as a kind of response to the work being done by his former collaborators on the Wick movies) before settling back into mildly amusing/occasionally annoying banter and overly complex plot machinations. Much like Gosling’s last outing in a movie like this, The Gray Man, the film just doesn’t know when to quit while it’s ahead.
Aside from capturing stunt work with geographical clarity and entertaining precision, this is Leitch’s trademark: all of his films are aggressively complex in a way that interferes with their simple pleasures, and all of them outstay their welcome (with the possible exception of Deadpool II, which at least had enough cooks in the kitchen to keep it on track). I’ll never forget being at SXSW for the premiere of Atomic Blonde, and watching as the entire balcony began to leave at what they assumed was the film’s ending – only to find themselves standing in the aisles for 20 minutes while the actual final set-piece played out. Yet one might have hoped that after a jumbled mess like Bullet Train, Leitch might have honed in a bit on what he’s got in front of him, namely two of the best actors working in proper Hollywood entertainment these days, rather than doing all he can to separate them as Gosling wanders from setpiece to setpiece in search of answers to a mystery that isn’t really needed (which is, I guess, an attempt to translate the “bounty hunting” aspect of the series’ premise into a self-contained feature film).
But as frustrating as The Fall Guy can be, there’s some genuine value in it – hearing Gosling shout at a ripped character that “their body needs glucose” and that they should eat carbs is an example of when the film’s humor works the way it should, and the stunt work is pretty incredible, as the Guiness Book of World Records will point out to you when you look up what exact record this film holds. But the idea of demythologizing the stuntman – the legendary unsung hero and figure of quasi-suicidal ambiguity – is a valuable one to popularize, and if nothing else, The Fall Guy makes a decent enough case for why we should give these performers Oscars. They, like gaffers and best boys and VFX artists, make Hollywood what it is, and deserve recognition for their work. So, eat your heart out, Tom Cruise: if you want honorifics for whatever crazy bullshit you do in the next Mission: Impossible, you should compete with the pros for the glory.