2024-04-29 14:39:37
“Action is character” is a saying in storytelling, especially in film. The characters are what they do. However, when the principle is taken to the extreme, it dissolves, namely in the figure of the stuntman. He is Hollywood’s most unsung hero. Falls out of every window, overturns the car, jumps over roofs, catches fire and drowns. He has a thousand faces – and yet remains nameless.
He – or she, because of course there are stunt women too – goes shopping unmolested as soon as the going gets tough, unlike the stars he doubles for. No paparazzo even blinks as he passes by. No Oscar has ever been awarded to him unless his name is Jackie Chan and he has long since become a star in his own right.
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Tom Cruise also gets a lot of credit for personally climbing the tallest skyscraper and catapulting himself into Alpine gorges on a motorcycle. Or at the beginning of the cinema Buster Keaton, who you can see on the Internet doing things that will still make your blood run cold a hundred years later.
Apparently there is already considerable potential for respect for the death-defying devils who collect broken bones instead of prizes over the course of their careers. There is just a lack of an established resonance space in which it could develop. In Hollywood’s elite society, the stuntman is one of the rank and file. He was knighted so rarely that you can count them on five bandaged fingers.
Ryan Gosling has been busy pumping
Actually, only two great homages to a cheated profession come to mind: “Hooper” from 1976, in which Burt Reynolds chases a rocket-powered car over a blown-up bridge. And “Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood” from 2019, where Brad Pitt plays Leonardo DiCaprio’s self-drunk drama queen with the mixture of coolness and understatement typical of stuntmen.
A similar constellation is also at the center of “The Fall Guy”, the most stunning cinematic love letter to the stuntman to date. There’s an egomaniacal super-narcissist named Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who brags about doing his own stunts (a prankster, if you’re thinking of his real-life almost-namesake). And his counterpart, who wears the same costume as the idolized leading actor in every scene he plays, but is considered so replaceable that the producers coldly regard him as a resource.
As in the examples above, the joke for viewers in the real world is once again that this supposedly despised nobody is embodied by one of today’s biggest stars: Ryan Gosling, the natural mother-in-law’s favorite who has been skillfully expanding his portfolio for years so that he has long since effortlessly switched from heartthrob to killer android and from ice cold to super funny. He recently breathed life into even the most ungrateful sidekick in toy history, Barbie’s Ken.
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Since then he has been pumping diligently, so that even after a broken spine, which at the beginning of the story threatens to put an abrupt end to his career, his muscles are glistening. In recent interviews, Gosling puts the new weight class on the Australian burritos he made during the six-month shoot down under also, as he says, because his character, the stuntman Colt Seavers, isn’t a food eater.
The new Colt Seavers
Colt Seavers? Wait, are we talking about the Colt Seavers who wore out one GMC pickup truck after another in “A Colt for All Occasions” in the ’80s? Who was such a cool guy that he immediately sang his own theme song in the form of stuntman Lee Major? And actually, the moment you realize this – that is, if you haven’t read it in the newspaper before – the country classic roars loudly from the speakers: “I might fall from a tall building, I might roll a brand-new car, / ’cause I’m the unknown stuntman that made Redford such a star.” Only in the updated version, Majors no longer sings, but, as with the new film, it has the same title as the one Series back then in the original, “The Fall Guy”, for a contemporary update.
The new Colt Seavers, for example, is only half macho. He struggles with traditional tough-man clichés and can’t offer an apology when he ghosts his girlfriend, camerawoman Jody Moreno, after the accident on set. But only because every “sorry” seems too weak and pitiful to him. At the same time, he has more humor than his 80s ancestor, who jumped over every wall with ease, but seemed surprisingly stiff when it came to wordplay, as you can see for yourself at any time on YouTube, where many of the old episodes can be seen.
Dream job as a crane operator: Ryan Gosling
Quelle: Universal Pictures/© Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
An incredibly funny scene finds the two ex-lovers together on the new film set. Jody has become a director, and because of her, Colt has pulled himself out of his interim job as a parking lot attendant, the highlight of which was doing donuts in other people’s Ford Mustangs with smoking tires. “Hey, Fall Guy,” some idiots called out to him mockingly and threw the keys over. So now he’s standing there in the Australian outback and Jody is explaining the story to him.
“Metal Storm,” apparently an amalgam of “High Noon” and “Star Wars,” is about an eccentric cowboy who falls in love with an alien lady. Based on the plot, Jody more or less subtly analyzes her own sad love story. And as a punishment, the ex-lover, who has unexpectedly returned, repeats the shot in which he slams against a rock while burning brightly, countless times.
Barbenheimer, finally united
Emily Blunt plays the injured but proud Jody with her usual grandeur. A lucky PR stunt takes advantage of the fact that she and Gosling were on opposite sides of last summer’s staged Barbenheimer contest and are now united in “The Fall Guy.” She isn’t really allowed to shine as an action heroine; While Gosling brawls with the bad guys outside on a passing garbage truck, she languishes in Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” in the karaoke bar. The man stands her up again, even if he has better reasons this time.
A rare action scene with Emily Blunt
Quelle: Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures/© Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
The plot is as complicated as a complicated stunt and should be kept quiet here for spoiler reasons. Suffice it to say that “The Fall Guy” manages the tightrope of combining comedy, action film with noir elements and sweet love story. Director David Leitch, himself a former stuntman who has doubled for Brad Pitt, is currently becoming the hottest ticket in Hollywood, having unleashed one high-octane feat after another on the screens in recent years: “John Wick,” “Atomic Blonde,” “Deadpool 2,” and “Bullet Train.”
At the end of the new film, two women face each other, one nice and one nasty. The mean one actually comes with: “Let’s stick together! The real problem is toxic masculinity!” She gets the payoff she deserves for such hypocritical talk. Lee Majors, the old Colt Seavers, immediately makes a small honorary appearance. And you think: The world could be so beautiful, old and new masculinity and femininity are reconciled, and the line is back where it belongs: between good and evil.
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