Not all movies should be high art. In fact, when you consider what kinds of stories constitute the most popular forms of narrative entertainment throughout history, extremely nuanced brilliant novels, films, and TV shows rarely make the cut. In fact, only the slow march of time turns mainstream opium for the masses into artistic genius after the fact. The best 20th-century historical example of this is 1977’s Star Wars, and it’s possible that a future generation’s version of this will be something like Emily in Paris.
Action films fill a particularly interesting niche within the not-quite-high-art-but-not-quite-trash label for movies in general. The amount of skill and specific types of craft required to flip cars or fall off of buildings convincingly is, in a sense, what movies exist to do on a fundamental level: create an illusion. So, what happens when you make a movie about movies that do that exact thing, and throw in some romance? The answer is, not much. But in the case of The Fall Guy — the 2024 action rom-com starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt — we’re dealing with a movie that accomplishes almost everything movies should do, on an almost primal level.
Fall Guy bombed at the box office when it came out in May 2024. But, now, it’s the number one movie streaming on Peacock. And that venue is probably where it should have debuted in the first place.
Technically based very loosely on the 1980s TV series of the same name, The Fall Guy focuses on an on-again/off-again romance between stuntman Colt (Gosling) and film director Jody (Blunt). Early in the film, Colt is badly wounded during a botched stunt, which he’s supposed to be performing for a bit action star named Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Time passes and Colt becomes a lovable loser, a washed-up stuntman parking cars instead of doing stuntman stuff.
The first 15 minutes of The Fall Guy feel like an exposition for a TV series that was never made, while the rest of the film feels like a long-resolution episode for the same nonexistent show. In other words, the storytelling of The Fall Guy is thin, but it makes up for it with an abundance of charm, action, and old-school hand-waving of obvious nonsensical details. Slowly, a murder-mystery, set-up plot seeps its way into the wink-wink rom-com plot, and before you know it, Gosling is hanging off the sides of trucks, traversing rings of fire, getting covered in gasoline, and barely hanging onto the sides of helicopters. In theory, The Fall Guy is paying tribute to these over-the-top action movie tropes, but sometimes, it feels like it's making fun of those movies, too.
However, if you’re a sucker for Jean-Claude Van Damm movies or Chuck Norris movies, or you’ve ever been excited by a car chase in a Bond movie, or anything in between, The Fall Guy is designed to be a kind of happy place of pure entertainment that winks at that same kind of pure entertainment. If anything about this movie is silly or annoying, a generous person can let it off the hook because, hey, look at what Ryan Gosling is doing!
This approach clearly won’t work for everyone, which is likely why the movie struggled to attract people to the theaters. And yet, since hitting Peacock, The Fall Guy has done numbers equal to the debut of Oppenheimer. What this means is that maybe Fall Guy should have been a stay-at-home movie all along. This is a comfort movie for date night, not a movie that expects you to fork over $15 bucks per ticket and double that for popcorn and drinks. With a theatrical release, The Fall Guy was punching above its weight. But now that it's streaming on Peacock, it's right at home. And, frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of movie at all. In fact, some of the most fun you’ll have watching a movie is just like this.
