The Stunt Driver Review

You’ve likely never heard of Ken Carter, a.k.a. “The Mad Canadian”. A stuntman who worked from the 1960s into the early 1980s, his jumps were impressive but could hardly compete with those of his rival from down south, Evel Knievel. In the wake of Evel’s failed jump of Snake River Canyon in 1974, Ken began to dream of his own showcase, a mile-long jump over the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. Finally, in 1976, the plan was coming together, ABC’s Wide World of Sports agreed to finance and air it, and construction on the car and the thousand-foot ramp began.

That’s more-or-less where we begin, following a short montage in which Carter (Jay Baruchel) is seen making some jumps and talking a big game and dumping all over his American rival (“he’s full of shit and a coward”). His wife (Laurence Leboeuf) doesn’t play much of a role in the plot, but she does occasionally pop up, first to offer encouragement and support, and later to reprimand him for putting his dream ahead of their financial solvency. He quickly recruited Dick Keller (Ed Helms) to build the car, as the company he co-founded (Reaction Dynamics) built Blue Flame, a rocket car that set a land speed record at Bonneville Salt Flats that had stood for six years (and would stand for another seven). Fictional Canadian stuntman Danny Lafortune (Marc Beaupré) is hired as his understudy, both as Ken’s protégé and a backup to quell the investors’ concerns, given the great expense and its scale far, far exceeding anything Carter had previously attempted (in real life, American Kenny Powers served this role). Given the historic nature of the jump to come, they also hired a documentarian Carter had previously worked with, Bob Fortier (Joe Cobden), who would eventually put out The Devil at Your Heels in 1981.

Carter is always good for a sound bite, partially because of his halting, enunciated speech, and partially due to his laid-back but steadfast rejection of authority, captured beautifully in his assertion that “books are for nerds, and badges are for pussies”. Such statements quickly inform you that despite its high-stakes, based on a true story nature, writer/director Michael Dowse has first and foremost made a comedy. Clashing hard with the stereotype of Canadians as endlessly “nice”, Montreal-born Carter is a blunt and fairly simple man, with many steadfast opinions he’s no qualms about sharing. He’s also quick to anger, and not afraid to give in to those impulses: an early site visit from Knieval (at ABC’s demand) devolves into a scuffle with no threat of harm, but many, many indelibly comedic images, including Carter straining against his team’s restraint to re-engage and Knievel’s goofy taunts.

The sense of comedy is further heightened by the handheld, deliberately imprecise style in which it’s shot by Sara Mishara, with many slightly unstable shots and unnecessary zooms combined with the lushness of 1970s Hollywood. Every corner of the screenplay has been plumbed for humor. Fatalist comments about the absurdity of safety equipment when sitting inches away from gallons of pressurized rocket fuel. Playing up his constant anxieties, entirely rational yet the subject of ridicule from much of the crew. Even recreations of old interviews, in which his tossed off comments enhance the impression of cool apathy.

But Dowse turns all that laughter into a crutch he’s unable to shift away from, and it weakens the deeper story every step of the way. There’s not much room for anything about the inspiration of human determination or the spirit of adventure or the way us mere mortals can live vicariously through the astounding feats of these madmen. They’re technically all in there, but just for a moment before Reginald Harkema’s chaotic editing washes them away. Sadness, grit, heartbreak, and more are undermined at every turn by a joke. There are two heart-to-heart, one-on-one conversations which are allowed to just play out, and they’re the two best moments of the film. They further highlight the undercurrent of masculinity that has pervaded every moment, and its counterpoint: “There’s not anything macho about being dead.”

The experience of the plot is further harmed by sweeping through a handful of different attempts and setbacks, all while scattering in interview clips and radio appearances from the years before his magnum opus. Dowse is unable to find an elegant way of moving us through the years, so every jump feels arbitrary and requires a title card to give us a brief sense of what’s happened in the meantime. Nowhere is this more true than the film’s coda, which even fumbles what you think you just witnessed with a news report and title card that seem to contradict that and each other. Maybe if there was a more palpable dramatic throughline, we’d have an easier time dialling into all that Dowse is trying to portray. But as is, it’s overstuffed with details that may be real but are ultimately irrelevant.

It’s a shame, because the central relationship is so well portrayed by Baruchel and Helms. Both actors are wonderfully embodying their wildly different characters, managing to land Carter and Keller on the same wavelength, and making their bond and mutual respect palpable whenever on screen together. They’re great in other moments as well, but the comedy takes a back seat in their conversations, allowing both men to exercise their well-established talents. Even Knievel gets some solid moments, brief as they are: Foster’s transformation plays for laughs much of the time, but his softer, slightly weathered features sand off the edges just enough that their eventual honest chat hits home. The glimmers we get of what this movie could have done with its subject matter make the actual result that much more disappointing.

If the main goal of a biopic is to inspire you to learn more about the person at its core, you could certainly do worse than Dowse’s attempt. Although there just isn’t all that much out there at present, making your task a lot harder. Almost all of it is centered around the stunt to which he dedicated years of his career; while that’s unfortunate, when your goal is to fly through the air for a mile in a rocket car with wings, it’s entirely predictable. But introducing people like me to his story, people from another country and of a much younger generation, ensures that the man will not be forgotten. And to hear him tell it while under hypnosis on The Ted Tevan Show, that’s the thing he wanted most from his art.