Combining action and comedy is more treacherous than it may initially seem. While any good action movie is going to have a few comedic beats (Die Hard is a very funny action movie), the action comedy is a movie that is dressed up like an action movie, but also has to be genuinely funny from beginning to end.
The Fall Guy manages that balance very well, thanks in large part to Ryan Gosling’s ability to make just about anything he does funny when he wants to. If you loved The Fall Guy and are looking for other great action comedies worth checking out, we’ve pulled three together that will hopefully fit the bill.
Midnight Run (1988)
One of the most beloved action comedies ever made, Midnight Run is essentially a road movie. Starring Charles Grodin as a man on the run, and Robert De Niro as the bounty hunter who ferries him across the country, the movie gets plenty of laughs out of the oddball pairing of the two actors, but it also manages to find ways to turn them into something like friends by the end of the movie.
Honestly, there’s nothing surprising about Midnight Run, except that it’s the best version of this kind of movie that you’re ever likely to see.
Midnight Run can be rented or purchased on Amazon Prime Video.
Spy (2015)
Melissa McCarthy has made some excellent comedies in her day, but Spy might be the best. At its most basic level, the movie plays as a parody of your average James Bond movie. McCarthy plays an analyst with field training who has to enter the field herself after her field agent is killed.
The plotting itself isn’t what makes this movie funny, though. Instead, it’s the combination of brilliant visual jokes and sharp writing. To top it all off, they somehow got Jason Statham to show up to play basically a parody of himself, and it’s one that he pulls off beautifully. Everything he says will leave you howling.
Spy is streaming on Max.
The Nice Guys (2016)
If you want to see Gosling at his silliest, The Nice Guys is the perfect place to start. While it’s a little less action forward than the other movies on this list, The Nice Guys is still thrilling enough to leave you whooping by its final moments, and it’s also one of the funniest movies of the last 20 years.
Set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, the movie follows a private detective and an enforcer who become an unlikely team when a young woman goes missing. While the movie has many of the trappings of great noir films of years past, The Nice Guys is funnier than almost any other movie like it, and it features Gosling at the top of his game.
The Nice Guys can be rented or purchased on Amazon Prime Video.
