The Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling, the funnier the fall

Harnessed like the climbers, he falls about twenty meters into the place of the star of the film. At the wheel of a screaming racing car, he performs a series of precise rolls. In a fireproof outfit, he ignites like a human torch, slides on the asphalt as if he were water skiing or even tumbles from a platform for an angel's jump captured in panoramic view. In a nutshell, his job is waterfalls. His specialty, castagne. However, his name never appears at the top of the poster, but rather in small print at the end of the credits. Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is a Hollywood stuntman used to playing shadow men. He is nicknamed “The Fall Guy”, “the man who falls”… And who always gets up, thumbs up like all movie stuntmen do to signify that everything is okay, after the word “cut” .

Also read: This new generation of French stuntmen who are taking their expertise to Hollywood

In The Fall Guy, this debonair hero with deep humility is just recovering from an accident that almost cost him his career. A producer as cynical as she is opportunistic hires him to find the star for whom he is the usual understudy and who has disappeared from the next blockbuster of her little protégé (Emily Blunt). As luck would have it, Seavers is crazy about this newbie director, with whom he flirted.

So much for the plot, thin but solid, of a film which is pure entertainment. By adapting The Man Who Falls Right on the big screen, a lovely vintage series from the 1980s with Lee Majors (also known for being “The Man Who Was Worth Three Billion”), former stuntman David Leitch has created a fairly exhilarating film. and twirling.

After making his debut in the 1990s in series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or in films such as The Matrix or Fight Club, Leatch became a stunt coordinator in the 2000s. Co-director, with his friend Chad Stahelski, of the film John Wick in 2014, he has since oriented his career towards offbeat action films, as rhythmic as they are entertaining.

The Fall Guy is one of those feature films with inventive choreography, each action sequence of which gives rise to pirouettes that are as funny as they are original. Under the air of a blockbuster, the film asserts itself as a love letter dedicated to the invisible work of Hollywood stuntmen or, more generally, a sincere ode to all the technical teams and other “little hands” who make the magic of cinema. yesterday and tomorrow.

Leitch even added the extra ingredient of a romantic comedy where the two main characters keep arguing with each other while burning to hug each other. By summoning the light spirit of the comedies of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, later perpetuated in When Harry Met Sally or Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Fall Guy multiplies the references to the Hollywood cinema of yesteryear. After playing the Ken figurine in Barbie, Ryan Gosling is comfortable in this role of good-natured “action man”. In Hollywood, he is the actor who comes at the right time...