Risky business
‘The Fall Guy’ is the latest love letter to Hollywood’s stunt performers. Here’s how other films have saluted the dangerous profession
In “The Fall Guy,” Ryan Reynolds plays ace Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers, whose belief in his own imperviousness to pain and suffering is total: pride, as they say, goes before the fall.
The film’s story picks up 18 months after Seavers is badly injured in an on-set accident and documents his attempts to reconnect with his daredevil instincts, both as a gesture of self-actualization and an attempt to win back his lover, a former camera operator turned big-time action-movie director named Jodi Moreno (Emily Blunt).
The joke is that Moreno gets off on watching her ex being brutalized and keeps dreaming up ever-moredangerous scenarios for him to survive. Rather than fight back, he accepts her assignments as a form of penance, quietly flashing his trademark thumbs up after each ordeal to show that he’s ready for the next take.
As a custom-tooled star vehicle for two charismatic headliners, “The Fall Guy” is perfectly serviceable. As a love letter to Hollywood’s stunt worker community, it’s passionately affectionate.
The film’s director, David Leitch, is a decorated stuntman who made his bones back in the 1990s, doubling for the likes of Brad Pitt and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and there are scenes in “The Fall Guy” goofing on this culture of stolen valour, in which talented, battle-hardened professionals take a beating to help A-listers look badass. But while Leitch’s sincerity and love for the milieu is undeniable, the film lacks the metaphysical grandeur (or wit) of other movies dramatizing this profession.
Exhibit A would, of course, be 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” which set the gold standard for industry satire with its story of a knockabout stunt performer turned matinee idol, played by Gene Kelly with equal measures of showmanship and self-deprecation. In a hilarious prologue, Kelly’s Don Lockwood performs a series of harrowing (and pretty obviously impossible) stunts: a tribute to several generations of fearless pioneers, including Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whose celebrity was bound up in their willingness to risk life and limb for the perfect slapstick payoff.
The respect for below-the-line veterans carries over into Burt Reynolds’ 1978 action-comedy “Hooper,” in which the “Smokey and the Bandit” star goofed on his leading-man image. The plot is simply a series of one-upping shenanigans carried out by Reynolds’ Sonny Hooper and his colleague/rival “Ski” (Jan-Michael Vincent). The film, directed by veteran stunt performer Hal Needham, helped pioneer the inclusion of a closing-credit blooper reel to show audiences the actual consequences of carefully choreographed stunt work.
Where “Hooper” aims for light entertainment, Richard Rush’s exhilarating existential melodrama “The Stunt Man” makes claims on profundity; it was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1981, including best actor and best director. The former citation went to the legendary Peter O’Toole, who played not the film’s title character — a paranoid fugitive hiding out on a movie set — but the megalomaniacal auteur putting him through his hazardous paces.
First glimpsed riding shotgun on a helicopter overseeing a complex action sequence, O’Toole’s Eli Cross may be the most entertaining avatar for unchecked ambition ever put on film. “If God could do the tricks that we can do, he’d be a happy man,” he booms, pleased to have set the record straight about his own artistic omnipotence.
Recognizing the leverage he holds over Steve Railsback’s Cameron — who’s wanted for attempted murder — Cross endeavours to humble him while getting the best possible footage. In the end (and in the best Hollywood tradition), their antagonistic, even murderous dynamic signals the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In recent years, no filmmaker has done more to revive — and interrogate — the theme of stunt work than Quentin Tarantino. In 2007’s “Death Proof,” he created not one but two enduring characters: the battle-scarred, sociopathic B-movie veteran “Stuntman Mike” (Kurt Russell), who moonlights as a serial killer, and iron woman Zoë Bell, a fictional version of the New Zealand-born stunt performer of the same name.
Having doubled for Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” films, Bell was a key member of Tarantino’s filmmaking circle and “Death Proof” was designed to showcase her talents. The scene in which Bell performs a stunt known as a “ship’s mast” — lashed to the hood of a moving car — offers an audacious blend of fiction and documentary, with the film’s characters offering commentary on the degree of difficulty and danger.
Essentially a combination chase movie and slasher parody, with the hood popped, “Death Proof” has also been interpreted as Tarantino’s mea culpa for a near-catastrophic crash on the set of “Kill Bill” involving Thurman — a formulation that would make the creepy Stuntman Mike into QT’s distorted mirror image, orchestrating acts of automotive carnage in an attempt to get his kicks.
Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is a more deceptive figure. A Second World War combat veteran who lives behind a drive-in with his pet pit bull, Booth has a main gig doubling for his hard-drinking pal, the western star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio); their tender codependency belies Booth’s reputation as a stone-cold killer (and apparently not just on the battlefield).
In the film’s funniest scene, he baits a charismatic Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) into a between-takes confrontation inspired by a mix of arrogance and boredom, a tussle that proves nothing beyond the fact that boys will be boys. Later, though, having protected Dalton from a potentially lethal predicament — one that leaves Booth gravely wounded — he has the class (and the deference) to simply offer his buddy a thumbs up from the back of an ambulance: another fall guy signalling that he’s not all right, but he’s OK.