What is the Ryan Gosling movie ‘The Fall Guy’ based on?
Repurposing pre-existing television properties and using them as the basis for action-packed blockbusters is hardly a fresh concept, and while Ryan Gosling and The Fall Guy might technically be cut from the same cloth as Denzel Washington and The Equalizer, they’re not quite the same.
Admittedly, both are adapted from popular 1980s TV shows of the same name that revolve around a protagonist who uses the skills they acquired during their professional career to apprehend criminals and exact justice on behalf of the downtrodden, but they go about it in very different ways.
Washington and Antoine Fuqua used their inspiration as the basis for a trio of hard-hitting R-rated thrillers with plenty of violence, whereas Gosling and director David Leitch leaned on the broadest strokes of The Fall Guy to craft a throwback action comedy that doubles as a love letter to the unsung and underappreciated stunt performers who rarely get the recognition they deserve for their contributions to the industry.
In its original form, Lee Majors’ The Fall Guy ran for five seasons and 113 episodes between 1981 and 1986, following stuntman Colt Seavers moonlighting as a bounty hunter, where he uses his intimate knowledge of stage combat, death-defying feats, and precision driving to take down bad guys and fugitives.
In Leitch’s film, Gosling’s Seavers is a Hollywood stuntman who tries to save the movie being directed by love interest Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) from disaster when Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s star Tom Ryder goes missing, unravelling a conspiracy that plunges the formerly-retired performer back into the thick of the action that threatens to derail not only the production, but his life.
Sure, Gosling carries the same name and drives the same truck as Majors did in The Fall Guy, but it’s hardly a like-for-like reboot. As a veteran stuntman himself who spent years doubling for Brad Pitt and working with the Wachowskis on The Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta, Speed Racer, and Jupiter Ascending, among others, Leitch wanted to use his adaptation of the show as a means to pay tribute to the people who willingly place themselves in the line of fire on set and rarely get rewarded for it.
Alongside his John Wick co-director and fellow ex-stuntman Chad Stahelski, Leitch has been at the forefront of pushing for stunts to be given their own category at the Academy Awards, with The Fall Guy serving as a glowing tribute to a line of work that Hollywood couldn’t survive without, and yet one that doesn’t get given the flowers it deserves.
It’s evocative of the TV series without a doubt, but Leitch’s background in that world ensured The Fall Guy would be injected with its director’s own opinions and admiration of stunt performers everywhere when he took it on as his most recent feature.
