“The Fall Guy” - A successful stunt.

Let’s jump right into it...The Fall Guy is an exceptionally fun movie. If you enjoyed Tropic Thunder and Bullet Train, put your hands together. If you didn’t enjoy those movies, well...maybe you just hate fun. The Fall Guy director David Leitch and writer Drew Pearce definitely like fun.

Depending on how old you are, you might remember The Fall Guy television show that ran in the early 1980s. I barely do. I remember that the main character was a stuntman and I remember his truck (mostly because I had the Hot Wheels copy of it). When the theme song started playing in the theater as the movie began, I found myself singing along with it, already starting to have fun.

(Very mild spoilers ahead.)

That stuntman’s name is Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling). On top of his game as the stuntman for A-list action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), he’s also working with the love of his life on a daily basis, camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). When he suffers a near-fatal accident during filming, he disappears from everyone and his life, including Jody. Eighteen months later, old friend and film producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) tracks Colt down and convinces him to fill in as a stuntman in a movie called Metalstorm, goading him into it on the basis that the film is also Jody’s directorial debut. After wrapping up his first day on set, Gail pulls Colt aside and reveals that Tom Ryder has disappeared and she asks Colt to track him down.

When Gail tells Colt she believes Tom has gotten mixed up with drug dealers, the first question the audience asks is “shouldn’t this be a job for the cops?” In poorly written movies, this question is either completely ignored or answered in a way that makes you roll your eyes so hard your seat reclines. In The Fall Guy, the first question Colt asks Gail is “should you call the cops?” Yay! And the answer from Gail is logical and believable - “if the cops get involved, the studio will find out the movie is way over budget and missing its star and they’ll kill production and you wouldn’t want that to happen to Jody, would you?” Yay!

With that final bit of setup complete, the movie plunges right into why it exists in the first place - action, romance, and comedy in heaping piles of deliciousness. The action was the easy part. The Fall Guy being an ode to practical stunts and stuntmen, Leitch crammed as many practical stunts into the film as he could. Wild car chases, jumps to and from helicopters, fight scenes, shootouts, explosions, people set on fire, even a world-record breaking cannon roll (where an explosion causes a vehicle to roll multiple times). The best thing about the action is it all serves a purpose other than action for action’s sake. Sometimes it’s to move the romance plotline, sometimes it’s for the movie within the movie, and sometimes it’s moving the plot to find Tom forward. For anyone who complains about too much CGI, happy birthday.

The comedy part is just as good as the action. Sometimes, the action is also the comedy. In one scene, Colt is set on fire and blown into a large rock over and over again as Jody expresses her displeasure at Colt abandoning her after his accident. In another, it’s the fake weapons Colt and stunt coordinator/best friend Dan (Winson Duke) must wield to fend off some bad guys. And when the action isn’t providing the comedy, it’s provided by the actors, who are delivering wonderfully likeable and hilarious performances. You’ll be cackling at Taylor-Johnson delivering one of the big, climactic, inspirational, pre-battle speeches in his best exaggerated Matthew McConaughey accent, but not until after you nearly pee yourself during a split-screen scene between Blunt and Gosling. And all of this happens in the context of making fun of blockbuster movie productions, much in the way Tropic Thunder did.

Finally, there’s the romance, which is mostly an extension of the comedy, but elicits real emotions from the audience. While the relationship between Jody and Colt is presented as mostly light-hearted and airy, there are moments that come across as really genuine, even when the film is trying to keep the tone light. Go back to the scene with Colt being all-but tortured by Jody as she confronts his abandonment over and over again. She’s doing this to him in the form of shooting multiple takes of the scene, substituting her own emotions as her movie character’s motivations while directing the scene. Everyone involved in the scene knows what’s going on, even to the point of being supportive of doing the scene over and over again. Blunt portrays real hurt in Jody, Gosling portrays real guilt and sorrow in Colt, all while everyone is trying not to laugh as Colt is slammed aflame into a rock wall over and over. It’s brilliant and, yes, extremely fun to watch.

While there is still a load of movies left to see this year, I have a hard time believing any will be as entertaining as The Fall Guy (yes, I’m well aware Deadpool 3 is one of them). It’s a near perfect blend of great acting, clever writing, amazing stunt work, and just the right amount of self-awareness. I could have done without the forced cameos from Lee Majors and Heather Thomas that felt like an afterthought, but even the best stunt people don’t get everything perfect.

Rating: That much fun is worth double what you paid for it.

“Bullet Train” - Come on ride the train.

As I struggled to come up with a theme for my review of Bullet Train, I skimmed through other, early reviews for ideas. To my surprise, Bullet Train has divided other critics almost right down the middle (currently sitting at 53% positive on Rotten Tomatoes; 49 on Metacritic). Beyond that, I also discovered Bullet Train brought Quentin Tarantino to the minds of a significant portion of critics, including a friend of mine that attended the same screening as I did. While I can see why they had that immediate thought, comparing Bullet Train to any Tarantino flick is to completely misunderstand Tarantino movies.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have never written a full review of a Tarantino film. Yeah, that surprised me a little as well, because I’ve seen all four movies he’s directed in the fourteen years I’ve been writing reviews. In fact, the only thing I’ve said about any of his movies during that time is including Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood in my 2019 Year in Review, saying “It’s Tarantino jerking off to himself in a mirror for two hours, then remembering he wanted to show an alt-history version of some Manson-cult murders.” Can you guess how I feel about Tarantino films?

Based on the reviews of Bullet Train, the parallel to Tarantino seems to be that Bullet Train contains a bunch of stylized violence surrounded by witty and glib banter. Fair enough, but that’s where the parallel stops. Hell, that describes every Marvel movie and nobody is confusing MCU films with Tarantino. And let’s not pretend that Tarantino invented banter or stylized violence. All he did was take 1970s kung-fu movies to the next level and wrap it in lessons learned from Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau flicks (to name just two legends of banter) or all 80s action flicks.

The main reasons I dislike Tarantino movies are that Tarantino seems to become bored with his own movies, as evidenced by the ends typically exploding in bloodbaths for no good reason (ex. Django Unchained), and his movies taking themselves way too seriously. Bullet Train makes neither of those mistakes. Its climactic bloodbath follows an entire film of bloodbaths and it is very much aware of itself as a non-serious action flick. If there is any director that Bullet Train should remind people of, it’s Matthew Vaughn (the Kingsman franchise).

Have I said too much about Tarantino, who has literally nothing to do with Bullet Train? Yep, and I apologize. It just annoys me to see Tarantino, one of the most overrated directors in the history of film, invoked as the reason to crap on Bullet Train, a film that does banter and stylized violence better than almost every Tarantino film. Here’s a head-scratching quote from Ann Hornaday (Washington Post), epitomizing such:

As if we needed more proof of the Tarantinization of contemporary cinema, “Bullet Train” barrels into theaters to remind us. A generation ago, Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” - followed by the even more popular “Pulp Fiction” - electrified audiences and the film industry alike, sending a jolt of visual energy and compulsive verbiage through an action genre that had gone moribund. Ever since, we’ve been awash in imitators who have sought to master QT’s branded elixir of sadistic violence punctuated by expository flashbacks, deep-cut needle drops and grandiloquent pronouncements on pop-culture arcana.

Has it gotten old yet?

Hornaday inexplicably continues:

If you’re craving one more variation on the well-worn theme of promiscuous bloodlettings accompanied by glib verbal filler, Leitch has served up a presentable slab of grist for an increasingly creaky mill.

Yes, Ann, I am craving it. Just like every moviegoer who enjoys glib action flicks. The reality is that Bullet Train is not just an entertaining romp of a popcorn flick, but a well-written romp featuring a cast of memorable characters portrayed by actors clearly having a blast in their respective roles. As much as the marketing would have you believe Brad Pitt is the star of this film, the entire cast makes you think the marketers didn’t actually watch the film. A cast featuring exquisite performances from Pitt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Tyree Henry, and Joey King, with great support from Sandra Bullock, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Andrew Koji, Zazie Beets, and Bad Bunny (as well as a couple of perfect cameos).

Pitt plays Ladybug, an assassin who believes bad luck follows him around. Not for him though, but for everyone around him. Even cars. Ladybug is tasked by his handler, Maria Beetle (Bullock), to snatch a briefcase from a bullet train heading to Kyoto. Unbeknownst to Ladybug, he is sharing the train with several other assassins who also have an interest in the briefcase, assassins who all have connections to each other. These connections are revealed to us through a series of flashbacks, which also double as character development, as well as revelations in real time. All of this plays out in the eight cars of the train, woven through a series of fight sequences and the banter we crave so much. The tightness with which everything is woven is a testament to director David Leitch and screenwriter Zak Olkewicz (adapted from the novel Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka).

All things on the train eventually lead to the reveal of the owner of the briefcase, crime kingpin White Death. Is White Death on the train? Is White Death waiting for them at Kyoto? Is White Death actually Maria Beetle? Are you White Death? You’re going to have to watch the film to find out. And you should watch the film. Not only is the mystery revealed, but all of the loose ends and side stories are tied up in a beautiful, if not blood-drenched, bow. If that doesn’t get you excited for a film, then you probably liked The Hateful Eight way too much.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back - it’s worth the ride.