Review by John P. Harvey.
Starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, and with references to actors reputed to do all their own stunts, The Fall Guy gives us some of the experience of those who roll with the punches but never show their faces on screen.
When your job is to take bruising punishment, fighting, falling, crashing, and burning on set every day, because you’re good at doing it without attracting serious injury, maybe you can become too blasé about the possibility of its going really wrong. When a serious wrong finally strikes Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), hospitalising him for months, it also wounds his confidence in his abilities and his worth to actress Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt).
Having disappeared from view for 18 months, Colt receives a call from an old acquaintance, film producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham), asking him to help save Jody’s new career as a first-time film director. And then… the actor for whom Colt stunt-doubles, the world-famous Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), goes missing before completion of shooting, and Gail sets Colt to find him and bring him back on set — with life-threatening results as Colt gets tangled up with Ryder’s villainous friends.
With appearances by Teresa Palmer and Stephanie Hsu, and even an extra layer of self-reference with the appearance of Lee Majors, who played Colt Leavers in the 1981 television series “The Fall Guy”, The Fall Guy offers plenty of nice one-liners if you’re fast enough. But there’s a lot to focus on. A nonstop symphony of action, comedy, romance, intrigue, action, and comedy, The Fall Guy offers belly laughs throughout.
The role of Jody Moreno offers a refreshing on-screen personality for Blunt, and Gosling is in his element as Colt, the intrepid action man who hides a heart of butter. The plot drops a couple of stitches, including Jody’s apparent indifference to the reasons for Colt’s long disappearance. And you know that it’ll end well. That aside, the storyline is largely unpredictable, and the entire film is vastly entertaining, interspersing action and self-referential movie tropes with great gags and genuine emotion, especially from Goslling.
As an extra tick for this film paying homage to stunt performers and giving several stunt performers named roles, stuntman Logan Holladay earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for most cannon rolls after, doubling for Gosling, he rolled a car eight and a half times.