The Fall Guy review: Barbenheimer makes falling over fun

After the most iconic cinematic battle of 2023, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s chemistry sets The Fall Guy ablaze with stunts, smooches, and sly behavior.

It’s official guys — Barbenheimer needs to be left in the past. With a press tour comprised of jokes and references to last year’s titan box office showdown, Barbie’s Ryan Gosling and Oppenheimer’s Emily Blunt prove that it’s not what you do, it’s who you work with. Together, they take on a movie adaptation of the 1980s TV show, starring as will-they-won’t-they lovers on opposite sides of the camera.

Colt (Gosling) is Hollywood’s leading stuntman, suffering a life-threatening injury that also wrecks his blossoming romance with camera operator Jody (Blunt). When Colt gets the call to work on Jody’s first film as director, he jumps at the chance, before realizing it’s all been a bit of a misunderstanding. Brooding with seedy subplots and laugh-out-loud moments, The Fall Guy has revived the commercial blockbuster that takes it easy on the drama.

Of course, there’s always a place for movies that really challenge their audience, but in recent years, the easy-going flicks have scraped the bottom of the barrel. Propelled by insane chemistry, record-breaking action, and a mind-scratching mystery, director David Leitch has engineered the beginning of a comeback — even if there are a few missteps along the way.

Finally Hollywood isn’t taking itself seriously

Sure, the epically never-ending stunts and action scenes are quite literally mind-blowing, but The Fall Guy is a movie all about connection. Thankfully for Leitch, Gosling and Blunt are an exceptional match for each other, constantly straddling the line between stupidity and lustful longing. In fact, their dive into onscreen silliness is so good that Gosling potentially runs the risk of being typecast, morphing into a Ken you can set on fire.

Leitch’s film is obviously a love letter to the craft viewers typically don’t see, and he’s certainly ticked the box of raising much-needed awareness. Even if moviegoers don’t wholly buy the plot, The Fall Guy is worth seeing for its impeccable action alone. Astonishing death-defying sequences are peppered in every other scene, prompting whoever is watching to wonder how on earth they got the budget to pull this off. It’s a good job that Gosling cemented his driving chops in Drive, rolling cars across a beach, jumping off of a moving 4×4 into a dumpster truck, and quite literally steering a boat with his butt (this last one will make sense with context).

Where Gosling is delivering hard on the action front — alongside an incredible team of off and on-camera stunt professionals — Blunt meets him in the emotional depths that are just the right amount of corny. Their fast-paced humor feels as though it’s unscripted, completely naturalistic in the face of events that are definitely not happening every day. Even the fake movie within a movie, Metal Storm, is a near stroke of genius, riffing off of everything that made the Dune marketing campaign astronomical.

Questionable decisions wrapped in sexy bacon

Universal Pictures

With visuals and a connection that are so spot on, it’s perhaps to be expected that The Fall Guy falls down in other areas (pun intended). While its joke writing is sharp and succinct, the film’s script falters in other areas. This is most obvious in a very questionable joke made about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s relationship, taking viewers unnecessarily out of a scene in its most harmless outcome. Decisions like this — ones that prompt the “Why did they just do that?” response — are small but frequent, which could easily be attributed to the chaotic life of being a humble stunt guy.

However, this definitely isn’t the case. Small continuity errors pile up like there’s no tomorrow, plot points often border on being unbelievable, and small snippets of dialogue become clunky and disjointed. Like the Hollywood-conditioned professionals they are, Gosling and Blunt take this all in their stride, masking over as many fumbles as humanly possible. It makes for an entertaining bumpy ride, but the ride is probably bumpy enough without the extra hiccups.

The Fall Guy review score: 4/5

Does a movie need to be perfect? No. Does it need to be entertaining? Always. The Fall Guy delivers the fun unspeakably well, melding viewers into a continuous behind-the-scenes shot that they’ll never want to leave. It occasionally falls down its own danger-made holes, but can always be counted on to recover.

Find even more amazing movies, TV shows, and true crime documentaries to catch on streaming this month. If that’s not enough, find out what’s in store this year for K-drama.