The Fall Guy Steals the Summer Back From Superheroes

Courtesy of Universal Pictures

The Fall Guy isn’t trying to make history or save the world. It’s a big-budget movie, based on an old TV show, about a stuntman named Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) who investigates the disappearance of the actor (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) he’s supposed to be doubling for on the set of a movie directed by his ex-girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt). To help his ex, and maybe win her back, Colt goes through a heightened gauntlet of outlandish off-set stunt sequences, infused with sparkling movie-star charisma. If this sounds, right down to the recycled title, a bit like The Nice Guys meets one of the other action movies directed by David Leitch (most recently of Bullet Train) with the added sheen of Gosling’s post-Barbie glow, well, that’s more or less what it is – albeit a blue-sky best-case-scenario version. By the quirks of release-date traditions, however, this also happens to be a historical marker, because The Fall Guy is kicking off the summer-movie season of 2024, which happens to be the first summer-movie season in nearly two decades without a superhero film leading the charge.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. At some point, Disney planned to open the summer movie season– which, unlike summer itself, inched earlier on the calendar throughout the ’90s before settling on the first weekend in May around the turn of this century– with Captain America: Brave New World, starring Anthony Mackie as the new Cap. (The proof is now appearing in a McDonald’s near you: Because of the long lead time needed to manufacture Happy Meal toys, adorable little plush previews of next February’s MCU sequel are out right now.) But when the strike reshuffled every studio’s release plans, The Fall Guy bravely claimed the first weekend in May. The last time a non-MCU title took this spot was a decade ago, with 2014’s off-brand The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The last time a non-superhero title had it was all the way back in 2006, with the debut of Mission: Impossible III. (Back then, it was the third underperforming kickoff in a row, following Van Helsing and Kingdom of Heaven.)

Technically, there was a break in both 2020, when COVID-19 closed most movie theaters for most of the summer, and in 2021, where a gradual re-opening meant that big summer movies trickled out slower, with Black Widow abdicating its May slot for a safer July. If you want to get really fussy, those last two Avengers movies got a week-early jump on their initially announced releases by coming out at the tail-end of April. But those were all exceptions that proved the rule: Summer doesn’t really start until a Marvel superhero shows up. It’s such a tradition that Free Comic Book Day, an annual promotion for the oft-woeful actual-comics industry, has planted itself on the first Saturday in May, in part to feed off excitement over whatever comics-based blockbuster was providing that summer’s first fireworks.

All of which makes plugging The Fall Guy into the superhero slot the rare display of marketing savvy that dovetails non-menacingly with the movie’s style and theme. Director David Leitch is a former stuntman himself, who graduated to second-unit directing, then made John Wick with his partner Chad Stahelski before splitting off to become a franchise go-to for the likes of Deadpool 2 and Hobbs & Shaw. His recent films have copious digital effects, as does The Fall Guy, but the latter feels less like a work of expensive animation and face-mapping – techniques that are both parodied and treated as an inevitable part of the moviemaking process. Though it’s obviously not a documentary, The Fall Guy takes great pleasure in showcasing that process; while Leitch’s Atomic Blonde used a “oner” to capture a major Charlize Theron brawl in what appeared to be a single shot (another technique enthused over by Blunt’s first-time director character), here Leitch uses long takes primarily on his film-set sequences, pulling together banter, tech-speak, and good old-fashioned professionalism for fast-paced walk-and-talk-and-kabooms, like some action-movie Sorkin. The expected in-jokes and goofy references never feel especially insular or smug; The Fall Guy is made with real love and high spirits.

And, in a perfectly ironic flex, a lot of those high spirits come from the movie’s flesh-and-blood stars. The Fall Guy winkingly portrays its leading-actor-within-the-movie as somewhere between insufferable and utterly replaceable – Colt doesn’t look that much like his more famous counterpart, just as Gosling doesn’t necessarily resemble Taylor-Johnson, and the movie goofs on how those lines can be effectively blurred with the right costuming and hairstyling. (It gets even more explicit about the disposability of actors, compared to the indispensability of good stunt performers, with one of its final gags.)

At the same time, it is wholly aware of how much Gosling and Blunt are bringing to the movie, even as it threatens to overdo the aw-shucks false modesty of having beloved world-famous avatar of good-humored handsomeness playing a knockabout stunt guy who bumbles his way through an amateur investigation. Gosling really does fuse the slapstick dexterity of his Nice Guys character with his endearingly lovesick Kenergy, and finishes it off with the genuine cool of the jacket-wearing Drive guy. This probably isn’t his best performance, but it’s probably his starriest – his most confident, comfortable, immediately lovable work as a leading man. Blunt, too, is in terrific form, doing the comedy-of-remarriage stuff with real warmth (even if the movie ultimately belongs to her co-star). In place of the annual superhero extravaganza, here is a movie where undisguised stars talk about – and, in Gosling’s case, repeatedly participate in – big, practical stunts, with the utmost reverence.

These things aren’t absent from superhero movies – not necessarily. Obviously, stunt performers work on even the most CG-choked productions. (Leitch even directed second unit on 2016’s summer kickoff title, Captain America: Civil War.) Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and even—I reluctantly admit—Chris Pratt have given star-making (if not always Chris-distinguishing) performances in these things, to say nothing of how Iron Man propelled Robert Downey Jr.’s whole deal into the stratosphere. Yet the lingering question does remain for most of them: Is it the actor, or is it the brand name? With that in mind, it doesn’t feel like an accident that neither Gosling nor Blunt have yet dipped into the MCU, or the DCEU, or whatever it is Sony has going on with the Spider-Man supporting cast. (Blunt was once tipped to play Black Widow, and has repeatedly demurred when asked the inevitable press-round questions about if she’d like another opportunity to jump on.) Anthony Mackie can assume the mantle of Captain America, and multiplexes can accommodate multiple Batmen and Jokers within months of each other. There’s no branded cowl, however, that can turn another actor into Ryan Gosling.

Yet if The Fall Guy is a perfectly timed repudiation of superheroes, it never feels like it’s kicking a genre when it’s down. This could be chalked up to its general yay-movies boosterism, the call coming from inside the industry. (The verbal references to other movies are extremely populist. The pop soundtrack is even more so, and genuinely pretty terrible.) The more charitable reading is that Leitch and screenwriter Drew Pearce seem genuinely enamored of (and delighted by) the filmmaking processes they’re depicting, regardless of the results. Metalstorm, the megaproduction Jody’s career has been staked on, looks a bit like Mad Max: Fury Road if it had been directed by Zack Snyder, with pretensions of Dune via its wailing-chorale score. In other words, it looks ridiculous and stupid. This transparently does not matter: Jody loves making movies, and she believes in this one – which makes Colt’s devotion to this piece of action-movie junk, from which his face will be digitally removed in post-production, weirdly touching and even romantic. In one scene where the two ex-lovers describe the film characters’ motivations while transparently discussing their own relationship travails, a hoary old gag that should come across as labored and somehow really works.

That’s how most of The Fall Guy operates. In terms of technical overkill, it’s only about 10 minutes and 20 percent less bombastic than your typical superhero blowout, but it’s performed, directed, and written with such a light touch that it often seems to be skipping merrily between (or through) its obligatory action sequences. The sudden introductions of “real” shoot-outs, car chases, attempted kidnappings, and explosions into this filmmaking world should be jarring; instead, Leitch gives it all a sort of dreamlike quality distinct from his Hobbs & Shaw patchiness. Colt mentions at one point that his first big job was working the Miami Vice stunt show at Universal Studios, and the movie’s action structure at times resembles one of those productions rather than a clearly delineated series of extended set pieces. It achieves a kind of ridiculous-action Zen.

Is this enough to storm the multiplexes and rescue them from franchise hell? Probably not; if The Fall Guy is a hit (and it deserves to be, whatever that means), it’s unlikely to make as much as, say, Eternals, let alone this summer’s forthcoming team-up between Deadpool and Wolverine – both superheroes Leitch has direct experience with, on projects likely to remain up there with the Captain America threequel as among the biggest movies he’s ever worked on. The Fall Guy is just one picture; it can’t save the world or even the imperiled theatrical experience just by taking a certain release date and offering a great time at the movies. But following a string of blockbusters that felt uncomfortably mercenary, The Fall Guy feels like a reclamation of process over result. Rather than glorying in meta-human feats, it unites unsung stunt performers and old-fashioned movie stars in their daft humanity.

Originally Appeared on GQ