The Fall Guy

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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A Fall Guy is a person to whom blame is attributed to deflect responsibility from another party.

Or it can refer to a Stunt Man, an actor who takes tumbles and falls for a movie star.

Fresh from his triumph as Barbie’s boyfriend Ken, Ryan Gosling takes the lead in “Fall Guy,” a new action comedy loosely based on the 1981 TV series about stunt performers.

You may have seen reruns of TV’s “The Fall Guy,” starring Lee Majors as a Hollywood stunt man who moonlighted as a bounty hunter.

As directed by David Leitch (“Atomic Blonde,” “Deadpool 2,” “Hobbs & Shaw”), himself a former stuntman, this “Fall Guy” pumps new action into the old TV premise.

Colt Seavers (now played by Ryan Gosling) is a past-his-prime stunt coordinator who finds himself working on a film being directed by his old girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt). When the movie’s A-lister star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) turns up missing, Colt goes looking for him to save his gal pal’s fledgling career.

Filming took place at a Disney Studio facility near Sydney, Australia. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson originally had been set to star as the stuntman.

David Leitch considers the movie to be a love letter to stunts. “We knew we had to be authentic in that world.” The film broke a Guinness World Record for the most cannon rolls in a car, with eight and a half rolls performed by real-life stunt driver Logan Holladay.

“The stunts are amazing,” says Gosling. “You can feel the difference. It’s a very unique perspective on a genre of movie that we all love so much but it’s from a perspective you’ve never seen it, from the people who actually make it and how sort of much they’ve been taken for granted.”

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a rating of 90%, saying, “With action, comedy, romance, and a pair of marvelously matched stars, ‘The Fall Guy’ might be the rare mainstream movie with something to entertain everyone.”

But it’s not a movie where you would have advised its actors to “break a leg.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com