Falling for The Fall Guy
As a Gen Xer, I’m 100% going to see The Fall Guy because while recycling IP from my childhood makes the creative in me itch, the nostalgic Man Of A Certain Age loves to see a good reboot of a classic.
The director, David Leitch, got his start in Hollywood as a stunt performer, and since the movie’s about a stunt man, well, Leitch wanted to be sure that the movie itself is a fitting homage to a profession that’s both underappreciated and probably under threat as Hollywood leans ever harder into CGI and AI.
Which brings us to world records, cannon rolls, and why it’s dusty in here all of a sudden.
The cannon roll, a classic stunt dating back to the early days of cinema, involves fitting a cannon-like apparatus beneath a car that shoots toward the ground. As the vehicle reaches a designated speed, the mechanism triggers and propels the car into a series of rolls. Holladay executed the stunt behind the wheel of a modified Jeep Grand Cherokee fitted with an external fiberglass body.
They set the world record for cannon rolls with eight and a half, beating the previous record of seven set by Casino Royale.
I will never not be moved by human accomplishment, even if it’s something so clearly juvenile and let’s face it male as making a car roll a bunch of times for a movie.
Because in a world that seems to keep tilting like the deck of the Titanic, it’s nice to see that we can still do things for the sheer joy of it.