Review: The Stunt Driver — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Stunt Driver

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

Stars: Jay Baruchel, Laurence Leboeuf, Ed Helms, Ben Foster

Writer/Director: Michael Dowse

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

 

You have probably never heard of 1970s stock car daredevil Ken Carter, and that, my friend, would be the man’s worst nightmare.

In this funny, thrilling tale of a stunt man’s rises and falls, the single-minded Carter (portrayed with dead-serious solemnity by Jay Baruchel) repeatedly insists that he’s spent his life leapfrogging over rows of parked school buses – and ultimately attempting to launch a rocket car over the St. Lawrence River – for one all-consuming reason:

“I want everyone to know my name.”

It’s hard to imagine a more oddball strategy to that end. Bus-jumping, for one thing, seems to be an inexact science: As he makes the rounds of fairs and dirt tracks, the odds seem about 50-50 that Carter will either make a clean leap from ramp to ramp – or he’ll come up disastrously short, plunging bumper-first into the roof of a decommissioned bus or junked car.

“Oh, man!” he yells in agony following one spectacular failure. “That’s the same ankle I broke last week!”

You can break your ankles, shatter your collarbone, and sacrifice your internal organs only so much, though. Despite his steady, low-burn popularity on the stunt car circuit, Carter decides he needs to take on one career-defining challenge before he has to call it quits. Watching TV with his ever-faithful and unreasonably supportive girlfriend, Gloria (charming Laurence Leboeuf of TV’s Transplant) he finds the inspiration for that challenge from the guy he considers his arch-rival: none other than Evel Knievel.

Significantly, it’s Knievel’s failed 1974 attempt to fly a rocket car over Idaho’s Snake River Canyon – an effort that ended with Knievel, still in his car, floating to the bottom of the canyon beneath his emergency parachute – that gets Carter’s juices flowing. He’s convinced the only reason the effort flopped was because Knievel chickened out and deployed his chute too early.

In a leap of logic, Carter decides to show up Knievel by riding his own rocket car across the St. Lawrence from Canada to the United States – a distance of one mile.

All he needs is a rocket car, a 90-foot-high ramp, and money. Lots and lots of money.

For the car, Carter enlists an engineer named Dick Keller (The Office’s Ed Helms), the man who designed and drove the rocket-powered Blue Flame, setting a land speed record of 409.277 mph in 1970. Helms’s Keller – a numbers man with a big heart – doesn’t exactly leap into the assignment: He’s pretty sure Carter (who can’t swim) is going to end up in the middle of the St. Lawrence.

Still, after meeting with the obsessive driver, he realizes Carter is going to pursue this cockamamie scheme with or without him. Confident he’s the only chance Carter has of surviving, Keller agrees to somehow cram the mechanics of a rocket car into the body of a Lincoln Continental.

For his ramp, Carter secures a launching spot on the Canadian side of the river and a landing area across the water – where he plants a large bed of roses in which he hopes to land.

Now, all he needs is money to pay for it all. Miraculously, Carter lands a meeting at ABC, which is desperately seeking content for its Wide World of Sports series. Reassured by the presence of Keller, the network gives the project a green light – and an infusion of green cash.

Stunt Driver at this point shifts into high gear as Carter obsessively oversees what he views as his crowning achievement. To ensure ratings and a sort of legitimacy, the network insists he bring Knievel aboard as an adviser – leading to a wonderful scene in which the world’s most famous stunt man, oozing with swagger superiority, arrives at the ramp site – a muddy pile of dirt – and predicts catastrophe.

Of course, that’s all Carter needs to hear: He will jump that river or die trying. Worried that the second option is a growing likelihood, Gloria reassures him that he can walk away at any time. Keller offers to call off the jump for technical reasons. But the promoters are cold-bloodedly insistent that the show must go on.

Happily for us, 50 years later few of us have any recollection of whether or not Carter ever made that jump. Writer/director Michael Dowse – a Canadian who has long loved Carter’s tale of obsession – capitalizes on that fact, effectively playing a will-he-or-won’t-he game of peek-a-boo.

Baruchel, (Knocked Up, How to Train Your Dragon) plays the guy known as “The Mad Canadian” with a mix of wide-eyed obsession and crippling insecurity. He starts out as an annoying portrait of misplaced masculinity, but as the date of the big jump nears, and Carter slips into a trembling “what-have-I-done?” funk, Baruchel’s performance deepens into an almost-painful poignancy.

Ed Helms (The Office) brings the voice of reason as Keller, who provides Carter with both a rocket-powered Lincoln and a late-life father figure. Ben Foster (Hell or High Water) gives a delightful turn as Knievel, to whom Carter is barely a blip on his ego-powered radar screen.

The film’s tone is light, despite some stark life-or-death moments, a delicate balance not entirely nailed by writer/director Dowse. Still, The Stunt Driver for the most part stays solidly in its lane, powering its way to an ending that is thrilling, perilous, and fraught with impending doom.

Which is, I’d guess, just the way Ken Carter would’ve wanted it.