Film / The Fall Guy (2024)

The Stuntman becomes the hero.

"You find Ryder, save Jody's film, you get the love of your life back."

— Gail

The Fall Guy is a 2024 action comedy film based upon the 1981 television series of the same name. It is directed by David Leitch, written by Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3, Hobbs & Shaw), and stars Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Stephanie Hsu, Winston Duke, Teresa Palmer, and Hannah Waddingham.

Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a veteran stunt performer who is injured in a stunt gone wrong and ends up losing his girlfriend Jody Moreno in the fallout. Eighteen months later and resigned to a mediocre life, he receives a call from Gail, producer for Jody's big budget sci-fi epic filming in Australia. She reveals that Tom Ryder, egotistical main actor for the film that Colt previously doubled for, has gone missing and they are desperate to keep it hidden before it derails the movie. Hoping to redeem himself by helping Jody, he works as a stuntman on set while tracking down Tom's associates.

The film released on May 3, 2024.

As with the show, the film bears no connection to the similarly named video game Fall Guys.

Previews: Trailer 1, Trailer 2

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The Fall Guy provides examples of:

• The Ace: Colt is a certified badass. He is a very successful stuntman, can hold his own in a real fight even while drugged, and can think on his feet and create creative solutions even in the most stressful situations such as shouting for help when Ryder's goons start drenching him in gasoline just so he can get a mouthful of it which he then spits into one of the goon's lighter to get an opportunity to escape. The only failure he ever had understandably put him out of the game for a good while, and it turns out the stunt's failure wasn't even his fault, it was sabotage.
• Adaptational Job Change: In the TV series, Jody is a fellow stunt performer alongside Colt. In the film, she starts as a camera operator and becomes a film director.
• Adaptation Name Change: Jody's last name is changed from "Banks" in the TV series to "Moreno" in the film.
• Adaptational Nationality: Jody, an American in the TV series, is British in the film.
• Arc Symbol: The "Thumbs Up" gesture, universal in the stunt community to let people know you're okay after rolling a truck or slamming into a boulder. Colt later turns it around explaining no stuntman ever wants to admit they're hurt, and a "Thumbs Down" is the worst thing imaginable for them.
• Artistic License – Film Production: The movie exaggerates and speeds up the process in how a movie is made. Colt shows up and is immediately recruited for a car flip being done that day, when such drivers are usually involved at the planning stages for accountability purposes. Pyrotechnics are also being set off as pranks, which would be a quick way to get fired. The film shows three different filming locations, one on a beach, one on the steps of the Sydney Opera House and one at what looks like a modified quarry/sand dunes and said to be the final filming day, when all three locations look to be epic set pieces and would spend weeks at each one. All that said, the film generally winks at these inconsistencies and includes several things going wrong that feels like it is taken from real life incidents.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: Metalstorm has several, and a fair chunk of the plot is devoted to filming them.
• Big "NO!": Tom lets out an epic one when Colt leaps out of the helicoptor with the recording of Tom confessing to murder in hand.
• Blatant Lies: Tom insists he does all his own stunts directly in front of his stuntman.
• Book Ends: The film beings with Colt performing a stunt fall, which goes wrong and ends up breaking his back, halting his career as a stunt man and ending his relationship with Jody. The final action scene ends with Colt legitimately leaping out of the helicoptor that Gail and Tom are trying to flee in, with the inriminating recording of Tom's Engineered Public Confession in hand, landing safely in a crash pad that the stunt performers had hastily placed beneath the aircraft.
• Brick Joke:
  • While Colt and Dan are searching the hundreds of Post-its covering Ryder's home looking for the password for his phone, they come across one of them that has "Ma-moa or Mo-moa?" written on it. Come the final scene of the movie, and an In-Universe trailer reveals that Jason Momoa has replaced Ryder as the star of the now completed Metalstorm.
  • When Colt is trying to get answers from Alma, she demands a producer's credit in the movie as her price. The aforementioned trailer has a very gratuitous producer's credit in her name during the middle of the trailer.
• The Brute: Dressler. Both Colt and Dan despite their best efforts can't put him down with regular fisticuffs. Ultimately Dan has to resort to a wire rig to throw and suspend Dressler in mid-air.
• Calling Your Attacks: When Dan gets into his first fight, he yells actor names with every blow he lands, such as Daniel Day-Lewis and Dwayne Johnson.
• The Cameo:
  • Lee Majors and Heather Thomas appear briefly in The Stinger as police officers who arrest Gail and Tom.
  • At the end of the movie, during the Comicon trailer for Metalstorm, it is revealed that Jason Momoa has replaced Ryder as the film's lead.
• Camera Abuse: While filming a scene on a beach where the car was going to roll, Colt struggled to keep the right distance from a lead car and ends up hitting the camera mounted on a job. The scene was still in motion and they had seven other cameras so they said to keep going.
• Career-Ending Injury: Early on in the film, Colt suffers one from a fall stunt gone wrong, leading him to cut himself off from Jody and the film industry. It is later revealed that Tom sabotaged the stunt himself, due to him feeling that Colt was showing his face too much during the stunt and stealing the spotlight from him.
• Chekhov's Skill: Colt began his career as a stuntman at the Miami Vice Action Spectacular at Universal Studios, and still wears the crew jacket every day. Said show apparently included him diving off an exploding speedboat several times a day, so he was able to put these skills to use to fake his death when pursued by Ryder's goons in Sydney harbor.
• Company Cross References:
  • The film opens with a montage of stunt sequences from various movies, one of them being the train escape scene from Fast Five, another Universal release.
  • Colt is a veteran of a Miami Vice stunt show at Universal Studios.
  • Colt and Dan both mention doing “Jason Bourne shit”, Bourne being another Universal Studios protagonist.
• Complexity Addiction: After accidentally killing his current stunt double, Tom and Gail come up with an overly complicated plan to bring Colt to Australia and frame him for the death... but using his yacht and the large number of ruthless mercenaries he currently employs as security to simply dispose of the body and then track down and dispose of all the video, apparently never crosses his mind.
• Conversational Troping: The movie is not shy about discussing various tropes. Colt gets a call from Jody where she discusses Split Screen as a cliche and when she says she thinks she'll do it the scene becomes a split screen of her and Colt. One even suggests they patch over a weak third act by having the characters in the movie comment on weak third acts.
• Counting Bullets: In the final showdown, Colt gives Gail a smirk after she takes the gun from the reluctant Tom, and tells her she's out of bullets. Then he jumps out of the helicopter anyway.
• Creator Breakdown: invoked When Jody sees Colt on set, she has him do numerous takes of being set on fire and thrown by wires into a boulder. In between takes she takes time in front of the entire crew to explain the whole story to Colt, a Starcrossed Lovers angle where the Space Cowboy just stops talking to Aliana and disappears. It's quite evident this movie is her trying to deal with the fallout of their relationship.
• Creator Cameo: The stunt team for Metalstorm all wear jackets indicating they work for 87 North, the production company for the actual film, in the climax.
• Cut Apart: After a particularly good film shoot showing that Colt and Jody are starting to get their spark back, Jody invites Colt to go to karaoke with her, which he accepts. Before he is able to go, he gets caught up in a giant action set piece involving a French dog and truck. Thinking that he has ditched her when he doesn't show up, Jody begins to sing a song that intercuts with Colt trying to survive. You even see the truck drive by through the window of the bar. Finally, Colt stops the bad guys and rushes back to the bar just as Jody finishes her number. Except by the time he arrives, most of the film crew, including Jody, had already left with only Dan and a few others still there.
• Damsel out of Distress: Ryder's kidnapped P.A. Alma manages to beat up one of her kidnappers and knock him out of the truck, although the truck would have then crashed without Colt's intervention and he also distracts some other thugs who would have been able to help the one Alma was fighting.
• Dented Iron: Colt suffered a really hard hit in the opening scene, requiring surgery and some rehabilitation. This doesn't appear to directly impact his current physical abilities, but has shaken his confidence. This is related to an underlying theme of the film in that stuntmen refuse to admit they are hurt.
• Digital Head Swap: Given it's a film about a Stunt Double on a big-budget movie, this comes up several times in the plot. Most notably, Jody takes advantage of Tom Ryder's absence and Colt's presence to film bigger, more impressive action scenes and then replace Colt's face with Ryder's in post, because Colt is much better at filming action scenes. After The Reveal, we see that Gail has used a Digital Head Swap to frame Colt for an Accidental Murder.
• Disney Acid Sequence: While at a nightclub looking for Tom, Colt is drugged and fights off several goons while high, with the lighting effect becoming very trippy and sparks flying away from every impact. Even after it dies down, he still hallucinates a full-sized unicorn.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Though the plot of the movie is outright shown to be Jody's attempt to work through her complicated feelings about Colt and how their relationship ended, one scene that hammers this in without the two even realizing it is when they are discussing the plot of the movie over the phone with a splitscreen shot (that they moments earlier just discussed the benefits of doing such a shot). While they are talking, Jody absent-mindedly puts on a prosthetic alien arm, highlighting that the alien in her movie represents her while they discuss what the arc of the movie should be (and by extension where their relationship should go).
• Double-Meaning Title: Colt works as a "fall guy" — i.e. a stuntman, taking falls (and hits, and fire). We eventually learn he's being set up to take the fall for an Accidental Murder.
• Engineered Public Confession: While not exactly a live broadcast, Colt and Jody are able to trick Tom into confessing his murders by forcing him into doing a dangerous stunt while forgetting his microphone is still on.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The bulk of the film takes place over about four days. Gail had Colt in Australia overnight and we are shown only three days of filming.
• Evil Is Petty: Tom nearly killed Colt and ended his career by sabotaging his fall stunt at the start of the movie, simply because he thought Colt pointed his face toward the camera too much and thus needed a 'lesson' even when Colt was redoing the stunt to correct this. He then inadvertently kills Henry after the latter made a mocking remark about Tom never doing his own stunts.
• Film Within a Film: Metalstorm, the film that Jody and Colt are making, is essentially a remake of Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn and can best be described as a cross between Mad Max: Fury Road and Dune (2021). We see snippets of the final film through the production.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Ryder's Post-it covered apartment. Among them are 'Shark Attack' and 'Penis Enlargement'.
• Gaslighting: Gail makes extensive use of this to manipulate and bamboozle both Colt and Jody combined with sheer Motor Mouth bluster and Blatant Lies. Eventually it loses its effectiveness when Colt and Jody realize what is going on and Gail lets slip their contempt for Jody by condescendingly noting how 'mouldable' she has been.
• Got Me Doing It: Jody ends up using Colt's finger gun gesture herself which she previously detested. Embarrassed, she tells Colt "You Didn't See That".
• Groin Attack: Tom’s dog aids Colt in a few fight scenes by biting the enemies in their groins.
• Heroes Love Dogs: Colt is reunited with Jean Claude, a miniature pinscher who ostensibly belongs to Tom. Jean Claude becomes a sidekick and only responds to French commands, Colt makes frequent use of the Groin Attack one.
• Hypocrite: Tom Ryder reveals he intentionally caused Colt's career-halting accident because he felt Colt had become too obsessed with himself and needed to be taken down a peg, even though Ryder is the one who is constantly shown to be a self-absorbed narcissist.
• Ignored Expert: When he arrives on the shoot, Colt quickly notes that the sand isn't quite right for the stunt driving he's expected to do, and they should wait until after the tide comes in and out again. He's overruled, and the car ride is unnecessarily bumpy when he does the student, leading to the destruction of a camera.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Tom explains Gails "simple solution" for him accidentally killing his stuntman, which is full of Complexity Addiction, something Colt points out.
• In Name Only: It's billed as The Film of the Series of The Fall Guy with Lee Majors but has little in common besides a few names and stunt work as a theme. In the show Colt was a stuntman who did work on the side as a Private Detective / Bounty Hunter to make ends meet, and would borrow his stunt equipment to do a particular job. The movie is an action-romantic-comedy involving a stuntman trying to salvage the directorial debut of his ex by finding the lead actor, which has very little actual detective work.
• It's All About Me: Tom's reaction to accidentally killing his stunt double is to cry about how "This is not what [he] needs right now."
• Karma Houdini: Ryder's girlfriend Iggy Starr was a part of the plot to frame Colt for murder, and yet the final scene in the movie reveals that apparently she was not replaced as the female lead in Metalstorm, implying she got away scot-free.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: At one point, Jody calls Colt to get his input on the movie. At the start of the call, she tells him that she's considering doing a split screen effect and asks him what he thinks of that. Naturally, the call transitions to a splitscreen effect.
• A Lizard Named "Liz": The main female character in Metalstorm is a female alien named Aliana.
• Made of Iron: Fitting for a stuntman, Colt goes through all sorts of punishment during the movie and never slows down. Hell, he fully recovered from a broken back in the span of 18 months.
• Meaningful Background Event: While Colt and Alma are talking on a sidewalk, a garbage disposal truck can be seen pulling up behind them and the two "garbage men" get slowly closer and closer to them as they converse. Then they suddenly whip out their tasers and strike both Colt and Alma, revealing themselves to be goons.
• "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name: This exchange between Colt and Jody in a car:
  Jody: We need to keep it super profesh.
  Colt: Profesh is my middle name.
  Jody: You said your middle name is Danger.
  Colt: That's a stage name.
• Muse Abuse: The relationship between "Space Cowboy" and Aliana in Metalstorm is transparently based in the bad way in which Colt and Jody's relationship fell apart after his accident, with a Sci-Fi paint job applied, and she makes no attempt to hide it when describing the plot to him, in front of the entire film crew.
• My Greatest Failure: Colt blames himself for the stunt-gone-wrong that ended his career and his relationship with Jody. We learn later in the film that Colt's accident was engineered by Tom.
• No Stunt Double:
  • invoked Tom Ryder is every arrogant Hollywood actor wrapped into one package, insisting he does his own stunts despite the fact Colt was his dedicated double for years. It's said by other characters that Tom isn't even all that good in general action scenes, and he is very skittish the instant someone suggests anything but a close-up. It is revealed he sabotaged Colt's wire stunt that broke his back, his ego made him think Colt was trying to upstage him and that same ego led to the death of his current stunt double. Notably, though, the film Hilarious Outtakes appropriately shows all of Ryan Gosling's stunt doubles.
  • Played straight with Iggy Starr, Ryder's girlfriend and co-star of Metalstorm, who can easily fight off Colt with just a prop katana, and is later seen doing the fight choreography herself with Colt during the big set piece in front of the Sydney Opera House.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Big Bad Gail is a smarmy person with Complexity Addiction and a fondness for having subordinates do all the hard work, but she does get in a few punches in the climax, steals back the evidence against Ryder, and nearly shoots Colt.
• The Oner: The film's prologue is all shot in a single take, right up until Colt's career-ending injury. Later in the film, the concept on the Oner is referenced by Jody when she's pitching ideas for Metalstorm.
• The Other Marty: In-Universe, after Tom's crimes are exposed the movie is reshot with Jason Momoa in the role.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • Colt's attempts to get into Ryder's hotel room. It takes him quite a while due to the key card for the room not working. He tries it several times, goes down to the front desk to get it fixed, tries the new card only for it not to work again, so he decides to simply break in and finds someone dead in the bathtub.
  • After going through a glass pane Colt is having a conversation with the lead actress and is trying to empty out all the glass shards in his jacket.
• Pet the Dog: Downplayed with Horrible Hollywood movie star Ryder's four actual pet dogs (he also has a cockatoo, but he's planning to sell it); he does give his assistant instructions to take care of them during his disappearance, but also only keeps at least one of them, Jean-Claude, around to do violent party tricks.
• Pink Elephants: Colt gets a spiced drink from Tom's drug dealer. He asks how long it should last and is told it's on its' way out when he sees the unicorn. About 20 minutes of the movie has a unicorn following him around.
• The Prima Donna: Tom Ryder. Even his longtime producer, Gail, acknowledges that he's an asshole to work with. His diva antics go so far as trying to kill two of his stunt doubles — and succeeding once.
• Recruit the Muggles: In the climax, most of the film crew help trick Ryder into confessing and a small army of stunt workers provide Dan backup during his fight with the mooks and mop the floor with them.
• Remake Cameo: Original series stars Lee Majors and Heather Thomas appear as police officers in the stinger, arriving to arrest Gail and Tom.
• Romance on the Set: Two instances In-Universe:
  • Colt and Jody were hot and heavy during productions they were both working on.
  • Tom Ryder is dating Iggy Starr, the female lead of Metalstorm, although it is never established if their relationship developed during filming or predated it.
• Scary Teeth: There is a shot in the trailer of a gangster smiling at the camera with an intimidating grill.
• Self-Disposing Villain: Ryder attempts to escape police custody by running onto the open set and trying to call for help. The use of his cell phone detonates the pyrotechnics on set, causing Ryder to blow himself up.
• Shout-Out:
  • The movie uses a lot of behind-the-scenes footage of stuntmen from real movies, including director David Leitch's previous films Atomic Blonde and Nobody.
  • A Running Gag has Dan quoting other movies for inspirational moments or just one-liners including Rocky Balboa and The Fast and the Furious.
  • The score for Metalstorm contains a One-Woman Wail very similar to that from the score for Dune.
• Space Western: Metalstorm, the Film Within a Film, is described this way. The protagonist is only ever referred to as "the Space Cowboy".
• The Stinger: Treated as a Previously on… segment, there is a midcredits sequence of police officers arriving to arrest Gail and Tom, with Tom fleeing into an area filled with pyrotechnics as getting blown to bits, prompting Alma to make a call requesting Jason Momoa’s agent.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: During the "splitscreen" phone call, you can see that Colt and Jody are going through the exact same physical motions while talking to each other, highlighting their compatibility despite their current relationship struggles.
• Vehicular Kidnapping: Midway through the film, Colt and Alma are tased by bad guys who drag Alma into a garbage truck, which Colt then pursues.
• Villain Respect: When Gail orders Ryder to shoot Colt, Ryder hesitates because he says that Colt is one of the best stuntmen he’s ever had.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: While it is all but stated that they are his usual protection detail, with Tom the kind of person who'd hire amoral killers for the job, one has to wonder where does a Hollywood movie star and/or movie producer get a hold of couple of dozen mercenaries willing to kill, kidnap and frame people at the drop of a hat to begin with?
• Working with the Ex: Colt and Jody dated on a previous production, and their breakup was not amicable. When Jody learns that Colt has been hired on Metalstorm, she's furious.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Colt claims to have gotten his start in stunt work doing several shows a day of the Miami Vice stunt show. The only problem with this is that the Miami Vice Action Spectacular at Universal Studios was only active until January of 1995, so assuming the film is set in the same year it was released, that would mean that for Colt to have worked there for any significant amount of time, he would have to be in his early 50s.
• You Didn't See That: Jody gives Colt a finger gun gesture at one point and is remarkably embarrassed, insisting Colt saw nothing.

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"You fall down, you get right back up. How far would you go for the one that you love?"