If you relished the portmanteau concept of Barbenheimer last year, get ready for some Colty. While that name doesn’t work at all, the combination of two of the stars of last year’s two biggest films teaming up to star in this year’s big action-comedy does. THE FALL GUY is both a blast from the past and a love letter to the unsung heroes of the action movie genre.

Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling, BARBIE; FIRST MAN) has a great career as the stunt double for action movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, BULLET TRAIN; THE KING’S MAN), but an accident on the set of one’s of Ryder’s movies sidelines him. Eighteen months later, he is contacted by Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham, THE HUSTLE), who tells him that she will be producing his former girlfriend’s, Jody Moreno’s (Emily Blunt, OPPENHEIMER; JUNGLE CRUISE), first film and that Moreno has asked for him to be Ryder’s stunt double again. With Moreno behind the camera and his best friend, Dan Tucker (Winston Duke, the BLACK PANTHER films; US), being the film’s stunt coordinator, Seavers decides to come out of retirement and join the production but it’s not an easy return, as he and Moreno have some unfinished business to resolve. To complicate matters further, Ryder goes missing from the set and Meyer asks Seavers to find the actor quickly to save Moreno’s film from shutting down.

TV watchers of a certain age (i.e., my age) will no doubt remember the popular TV series of the same name from the early 1980s starring Lee Majors and Heather Thomas. (I’ll admit that I watched one or two episodes at most.) While THE FALL GUY is based on the TV series, the connection between the two is very loose. In the TV show, Colt Seavers moonlights as a bounty hunter. Perhaps a movie sequel will move in that direction but right now with this film, Seavers is just a stuntman who gets caught up in a mystery. That’s not to say that THE FALL GUY is lacking. Director David Leitch (BULLET TRAIN; DEADPOOL 2) used to be the stunt double for Brad Pitt and Jean-Claude Van Damme so he knows a thing or two about the business and, as he says in the film’s onscreen prologue, THE FALL GUY is really just a love letter to the unnamed men and women who make action films so exciting for audiences to watch. In that respect, THE FALL GUY delivers in spades. While the stunts may not be at the level of a Tom Cruise movie, they are fun to watch and one of them even broke a Guinness World Record. You’ll know it when you see it!

Colt Seavers is a character ideally suited to Gosling, who is just a year older than Lee Majors was when the TV series began. With his blond-tinged hair (to match Tom Ryder’s dyed coif) and toned body, which was no doubt left over from the BARBIE production, he is completely believable as someone who can get blown up, dropped from height, set on fire and leap from a camera crane onto a moving helicopter. Obviously, it’s not Gosling doing all those stunts, and that’s a testament both to Leitch’s ability to make it all look seamless and to the real stuntpeople who make it so much fun to watch. Blunt pulls her own weight here too, and her ongoing banter with Gosling seems very natural. I have to think that much of it was unscripted. Certainly, if you watch one of the film’s trailers (not the one below), there are a number of scenes that are very different from the film’s final cut.

The film also includes a few cameos – two that went over the heads of most of my Millennial and Gen Z audience and one that came as a delightful surprise to everyone. Stephanie Hsu (EEAAO; JOY RIDE) also appears as Ryder’s personal assistant, Alma Milan. I get the impression that much of her performance got left on the cutting room floor, which is too bad as she always brings her A game to her roles.

THE FALL GUY opened in Hong Kong yesterday (April 25th) and is starting to roll out around the world today. The story takes a back seat to the stunts (just like the TV show did) but it’s still good entertainment.

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