We need more movies like Fall Guy
Hollywood kind of sucks right now, but they still make a few good ones


Two of the best movies over the last 12 months crashed and burned at the box office for the most disturbing of reasons.
If you had me list my favorite movies of the last year, Confess, Fletch and Fall Guy would be really high on the list. Granted, they both were made basically for me. Fletch is one of my favorite all-time characters and Jon Hamm nailed it just as much—in a different way—than Chevy Chase did in the original movie (we’ll all just agree to pretend that Fletch Lives never existed). And not only did I inexplicably love Lee Majors’ The Fall Guy TV series in the ‘80s1, but the movie features Ryan Gosling in full The Nice Guys mode, which is the best possible Gosling mode. Add in Emily Blunt and baby, you got a stew going.
Both movies are good, and really funny, and both were box office duds. Is it because the average movie goer these days is dumber than they used to be? Maybe. Probably not. Possibly. Who knows?
Are studios dumber than ever? Yes. Of course they are.
Confess, Fletch barely got any promotion. You probably heard or read more about it from me than you did from Paramount. Why would they do all the things you need to do to make a movie and then not promote it?
What are the things you need to do to make a movie? I’m not sure but I think the list is:
- Pay somebody to write a script
- Hire actors and a director
- Rent a microphone and a camera and maybe a backhoe from United Rentals, I guess or buy a camera from Best Buy and then take it back before the 30 day return policy expires…either one seems good
- Something, something craft services
- Download some tunes from Apple Music
- Edit it all in iMovie
- Profit
Why would you go to all that trouble and then not promote a movie?
I saw Confess, Fletch on a Wednesday afternoon last September. I had taken much of the day off to get a flu shot and a Covid vaccine and I knew in a few hours I’d feel like shit, so I went to a 1:30 p.m. showing. It was me and two old ladies and we had the best time. They loved the movie. They thought everything was hilarious (and large parts of it are). The scene where Annie Mumolo’s character basically burns her kitchen down—and doesn’t realize it—while talking to Fletch had all three of us in stitches.
One of them yelled out loud when she figured out who was responsible for the big mystery. A good time was had by all.
And it was a good thing that I went on that Wednesday because by Friday it wasn’t playing anymore. It was out in theaters for SIX DAYS! It was on Showtime three weeks later. It’s good. You should see it if you haven’t, or see it again if you have. It’s on Paramount+ now. If you don’t have Paramount+, now’s a good time to sign up for a month, watch Confess, Fletch and both seasons of Colin from Accounts, and burn through the first two seasons of the UK version of Ghosts if you want.
Oh, and Paramount+ has every episode of Cheers, so you get that as a nice bonus.
Fall Guy is on Peacock. It’s such a good movie. Gosling is very funny in it, Blunt is always good and you get a nice bonus that you’ll hear her amazing singing voice doing a karaoke version of Phil Collins’ best song, “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)”, and there’s an award winning performance by Jean Claude the dog.
Plus, Lee Majors and Heather Thomas show up for the post credits sting, as cops in…Australia, I guess. Sure. Why not?
You don’t remember Heather Thomas? Uh, yeah you do.

If you didn’t watch The Fall Guy when it was on TV, you won’t be lost when you see the movie. First, because no plot on the TV show was ever very complicated, but because the movie has more in common with the Burt Reynolds movie Hooper than the old TV show.
Hooper was a movie about stunt men directed by an old stunt man, Hal Needham. And it’s funny, and good. Terry Bradshaw gets a tooth knocked out in it! Jan Michael Vincent is in it without his helicopter! OK, fine, I’m not selling it well, but it is a good movie. It was right in the middle of Burt’s “I’m so charming I can make anything watchable” phase of Gator, Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run, etc. All bad movies. All super fun and super rewatchable.
Fall Guy is also directed by a former stuntman, David Leitch, who also directed the cinematic classics Bullet Train, Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde. And where in the TV show, Lee Major’s character Colt Seavers was a bounty hunter, in the movie, Gosling’s Seavers is a stunt man who suffered a career-ending injury but is brought out of a depressing retirement working as a parking valet because he thinks he’s been hand picked by a movie’s director who happens to be his ex-girlfriend. Then he thinks he’s really there to find the missing star of the movie (who he has been the long time stunt double for) only to find out he’s actually been brought there to be framed for a murder.
The stunts in the movie need to be good, and they are. But the best parts of the movie are just how charming Gosling and Blunt are together.
It’s kind of infuriating that Gosling can be that handsome and somehow believably play overwhelmed dopes that you can’t help but like.
Fall Guy got infinitely better promoted than Confess, Fletch but it’s theatrical run was still too short. Movies like this need to stick around for a while so that those of us who go see it right away can tell other people to go see it and they still have enough time to do it.
On streaming you can watch a longer cut of it, because nothing brings in a new audience to a movie they never saw than a longer version of a movie they never saw. But actually, the longer cut is probably worth it because there’s an extended version of a very impressive fight scene in a neon lit nightclub shown from Colt’s perspective after he unwittingly drinks something spiked with a psychadelic that, among other things, makes him see a unicorn. OK, that makes no sense, but the fight scene is cool.
The problem with all of this is that Hollywood is not making enough movies like Confess, Fletch, or Fall Guy or The Nice Guys (which you also need to see if you haven’t) so when they do we need to go see them so they decide to make more of them. But they make them hard to see by whisking them in and out of theaters before most of us know they’ve been there. It’s all so dumb.
But hey, you’ve got me here now to let you know what to go see. So that’s something, right?
No?

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One of my few complaints about the movie is that they replaced the Lee Majors version of the theme song with a new, generic Blake Shelton version and buried it at the end of the movie. I thought for sure they’d steal a page from the Mission: Impossible movies and do a TV-style opening credit montage to set up the movie and use the original song. Oh, well. ↩