This is the first review on the Saturday Movie Blog so the format is still being tweaked before I get it locked in then get bored with this project and abandon it as has been my pattern.
One this I KNOW I will be doing though is not worrying about spoilers… so if you want a spoiler free review, don’t read beyond this point, or go read someone else’s site.
Date Watched
5/4/2024
Snacks
Large Diet Coke that I only drank 25% of
Plot Synopsis
Basically the plot is that Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is a stuntman for big budget action movies, and he is in love with a camerawoman named Jody (Emily Blunt) who he often works with.
There is also a douchebag main actor who he does the stunts for (Tom Ryder).
Colt is kind of dumb, but has a big heart lovable doofus type.
In the opening sequence we see him do a stunt that involves falling down some kind of shaft… and afterwards the DB main actor makes him do it again to really nail it.
Colt goes up to do it and his harness doesn’t work ala Owen Hart and he falls to the bottom and breaks his back.
Fast forward a certain amount of time that I don’t recall and we see Colt is now working as a valet and no longer in the movie industry, when an agent that was in the opening scene that I forgot to mention (Hannah Waddingham) calls him and tells him that Jody is now directing her first film and has requested to have him be on the stunt crew for the movie.
This is when the movie actually starts, as Colt heads to the movie set… which appears to be some sort of cross between Mad Max and Aliens and does his first stunt driving some sort of truck that he has to destroy… and survive.
He does, and then Jody sees that it is him and is pissed he’s there because apparently he never spoke to her after the accident… the agent makes her keep Colt on the movie though (this will become important later) so he stays and Jody begins to torture him by making him do a dangerous stunt over and over because she is still mad at him.
Afterwards the agent tells Colt in private that the star of the movie, the same DB actor from the opening sequence because of course, has disappeared, and if he wants Jody’s movie to succeed he needs to find him in 2 days or production will have to stop.
If you are asking yourself why she would send a dufus stuntman to find a missing person… well so was I.
Colt reluctantly agrees and goes to Tom, the DB actor’s apartment to find a clue that will lead to his whereabouts.
It is at this point that we learn that Colt has a super power… the power of invincible plot armor. He uses this power throughout the rest of the film, so if you are one of those people that doesn’t like unrealistic satire you will likely check out at this point, but if you can accept the laws of a movie universe only apply to that movie you will enjoy this.
Colt is attacked in Tom’s apartment by Tom’s girlfriend where they have a Kill Bill style brawl (though he eventually convinces her he is looking for Tom because he is missing), this leads him to his next lead which is a night club that has so many Black Lights that it makes the director of Batman Forever think they overdid it.
Colt uses his super power to beat up a whole bunch of people and get another lead form one of the guys there… this leads him to a hotel where he finds a dead body in a bathtub full of ice and peaces the fuck out of there.
Then some more plot happens but it is really just there to get to the next clue which is Tom’s cellphone that can apparently reveal where Tom is.
Colt finds the phone then goes through an action sequence where he is fighting on a dump truck and has a stunt dog who is trained to bite people in the balls to help him.
He and his sidekick (of whose demographic I will let you guess because Hollywood is progressive but not THAT progressive) end up back at Tom’s apartment and manage to crack into his cell phone and the find footage of Tom at a party that shows him killing the guy in the bathtub who was apparently the original stunt man for the movie.
Bad guys show up and the phone gets destroyed, and Colt gets kidnapped… and it turns out Tom is the one behind the bad guys and kidnaps Colt thinking he still has the cell phone.
He then goes into a bad guy monologue and explains he killed the stuntman, he caused Colt’s original accident, and the agent was the one that gave him the idea to frame Colt via deep fake technology for the stunt man’s murder.
Colt escapes and is apparently killed in the attempt… but we’ve got 45 minutes of screen time left and Ryan Gosling is the star, and has plot armor like none you’ve ever seen so of course he is alive.
He gets back to the movie set and he and Jody decide they need to get Tom to confess because the cell phone was destroyed and that is the only way to finish the movie and clear Colt.
This leads to an insanely complex scheme where they are going to convince Tom to do his own stunt which requires jumping a car over a canyon, have Colt somehow get in the car with him and trick him into confessing AND complete the stunt so the movie can be produced.
They succeed through the power of being the good guys in the movie, but the agent gets the recording of the confession and tries to escape with it (rather than, you know, destroying it because bad guys are always dumb) which leads to another action scene where she and Tom try to escape via a helicopter that Colt manages to jump onto from a boom mic crane, gets the confession recording, jumps off the helicopter onto one of those big stunt pillow things at the same time that his sidekick manages to bring down the helicopter.
Bad guys stopped, confession made public, movie is produced, and everyone lives happily ever after until at least the sequel.
My Take
This was actually a lot of fun. It didn’t take itself seriously at all and allowed you to shut your brain off and enjoy the ridiculous over the top action sequence, and mostly well executed humor.
It isn’t for everyone… if you are one of those people that can’t accept something not being even minimally realistic this isn’t for you.
Despite it being a reimagining of the TV show from the 70s it didn’t reference it in many ways (or if it did I didn’t get it because I barely remember that show) but they did have a nice tribute in the after credits where they brought back 2 of the main stars from the original TV series.
The mid credit scene was cool too because it showed behind the scenes of the actual stunt men from the movie doing the stunts for the actors that were playing stunt men… stunt man inception if you will.
Score
For now the scale here will be a star scale that goes up to 5 with 5 stars being the best. I would give The Fall Guy *** 1/2 stars and say it was a great way to have something fun and not to serious for a couple of hours and slightly recommend it.
The Fall Guy Review After Credits
This section will be where I add additional thoughts beyond just the movie itself.
For now I just want to say I am resisting the temptation to make this and future posts more SEO friendly (SEO is part of my day job) by stuffing in additional phrases and keywords and etc… like “Does The Fall Guy Have An After Credits Scene?” “The Fall Guy Spoilers” and doing a bunch of fancy SEO stuff to bring this in some Google traffic.
But if anyone ever reads this please let me know your thoughts and follow us on social media once we have some social media!