The Fall Guy Isn't About the Fall Guy

It's about the movie star.

As with Barbie, so with David Leitch’s The Fall Guy; both are movies ostensibly about empowering and celebrating marginalized people, which turn out to instead be about charming white guy movie star Ryan Gosling. Once, can be an accident. Twice starts to look like carelessness.

And, in fact, The Fall Guy is not a carefully made movie. Its plot is standard action/comedy movie fare; stunt man Colt Seavers (Gosling) suffers a major injury while performing a dangerous rappelling stunt for movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Sidelined for 18 months, he falls into a pit of self-loathing and refuses to speak to his camerawoman girlfriend Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt.)

Colt’s finally pulled out of his funk when he’s called back to stunt double for Ryder on Jody’s first director gig, Metalstorm. When he arrives, though, he finds out that Ryder’s disappeared under shady circumstances; the movie may be derailed and with it Jody’s career. Can Colt find Ryder and patch up his relationship with Jody before the credits roll?!

It's not much of a spoiler to say that the answers there aren’t very mysterious. Leitch himself realizes it’s all default, and uses the narrative mostly to get you from stunt sequence to stunt sequence to close-up of Gosling being charming. Some of these are fun—a trippy battle with liquor bottles is a highlight. But the best bit of the film is a split screen phone-call flirtation between Colt and Jody in which the two mirror each other’s body language unconsciously while Jody randomly dons a giant prop alien hand. It’s sweet and weird and it makes you wish this were a romcom with a handful of stunts rather than a stuntfest with a sprinkling of romcom.

A bigger role for Blunt would also make more sense thematically. Barbie was about the evils of patriarchy and hierarchy; Fall Guy is about the evils of hierarchical and patriarchal filmmaking. Ryder is an archetypal narcissistic Hollywood big name asshole; he’s vain and he treats the “little people” around him—especially the stuntmen—as punching bags and worse than punching bags.

The film’s plea to recognize, and recenter, the hard working, working class stuntpeople is echoed by its decision to have a woman director as a central character. In 2023, only 12% of directors of top-grossing films were women, and those women directors have historically had little recognition; only three women have ever won an Oscar for Best Director. The choice to show us Jody ordering actors around, writing the script, and generally getting her vision on screen is therefore a clear and intentional choice. One of the emotional highlights of the film is when Colt passionately declares that Jody getting a chance to direct Metalstorm, and more films, is more important to him than his freedom, his safety, or his life. “You’re special,” he says; she is, in his mind the star, and he’s just a supporting character. It’s the sort of speech good Ken might make—and Jody is (as you’d expect) swept off her feet.

It's a fun scene. But it’s hard to get past the fact that it’s also a lie. The Fall Guy may say it’s about Jody, but the truth is it’s not her film—first because she’s got significantly less screentime than Cody, and second because she’s not the director, nor even a stand-in for the (male) director. Leitch was, famously, a stuntman himself before he turned to directing (stunt heavy) films such as Atomic Blonde and Hobbes & Shaw. The self-insert character here is Colt, not Judy, because this is another big-budget Hollywood film directed by a man, not by a woman.

You’d think in this case the film’s commitment to celebrating its stunt people should come off as more sincere. And yet, here too, the film vacillates. Yes, Gosling is playing a stuntman—but it’s Gosling playing a stunt man. The movie is first and foremost about his face and his charisma; there isn’t a sequence that’s really comparable to the one in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof where amazing stuntwoman Zoë Bell performs amazing stunts on the hood of a car as the amazing character, Zoë Bell. This is Ryan Gosling, movie star, pretending to be a regular joe stunt guy, while occasionally regular joe stunt guys pretend to be Ryan Gosling while making sure you never see their faces. (And no, the montage at the end where you get to see a bit more of the stunt performers doesn’t change that dynamic, even if it is laudable.)

The Fall Guy gestures at highlighting some forgotten figures of cinema. But it’s real focus is the usual one; it’s looking to find the next great white hope male movie star. As film commenter Dirk Lester noted in a perceptive tweet, The Fall Guy is Gosling’s umpty umpth go round “in the Next Tom Cruise™ launcher.”

Tom Cruise is mentioned specifically in an off-hand callout, and Ryder, who keeps boasting about how he “does his own stunts” is obviously meant as a Cruise analog of sorts. Gosling, in this context, isn’t just a stunt double for Ryder; he is (aspirationally at least) a double/successor, taking the part of Tom Cruise in this action movie and maybe, please, maybe, the position of Cruise as an international bankable superstar in all the action movies to come.

That’s why the movie’s good-natured comedy-action tropes often come across as hollow and grating. If the movie were true to itself, it should be a scrappy, scuzzy goof, with unknown stunt people awkwardly hamming their way through the acting parts before triumphing in the stunts they perform themselves. Instead, the movie is the very kind of empty star vehicle it’s mocking, focused on using all its resources—the stunt people, the romantic female lead, the canine trainers, the explosions, the cars—to enhance and create the charisma of the biggest name on the marquee.

Gosling does have charisma—more than the uncanny valley ego pit that is Tom Cruise, for sure. But as The Fall Guy occasionally seems to realize, a movie industry obsessively focused on a handful of white guy faces is boring, toxic, and demeaning for everyone else associated with filmmaking, not to mention for the culture at large. I really wanted to like The Fall Guy, but unfortunately it’s not about the fall guy. It’s about the guy for whom everyone is supposed to take a fall.  I have seen that movie before and, vague gestures at self-awareness notwithstanding, I don’t need to see it again.