Another day, another film that premiered at TIFF two weeks ago, we got Jay Baruchel in The Stunt Driver along with Ed Helms.Being a Canadian myself, I had never knew about Ken Carter at all, but with an introduction like this formed together into a comedy, I was really interested to see where this was going. First things first, this has some good direction, Jay is acting his ass off once again, and he’s so damn underrated, and Ed Helms is doing his job as well, the comedy is working, i’m laughing, yet the audience with 4 or 5 people is not connecting with it, which is a shame with the amount of times I laughed, but you can’t always win all the time with a vibe. Besides that though, the documentary style 1970s footage was done well, made you believe that it was done in that decade, same with Villeneuve at times (another one watched at the festival this season) Truly invested I felt with this one, an outlandish idea of Ken wanting to pass Evel Knievel, and having them build him a long ramp, equipped with a freaking rocket car, in fear that it was actually gonna kill him… which it did, absurd and crazy it had been in the movie, unbelievable in real life he did it, and it ended his life. But wow, I did like this, it was Canadian as it should’ve been, and it was enjoyable for the most part, with a few minutes being a bit of a shut down, a boot back up, once his friend did it, and suffered major injuries, that’s when he wanted to do it, and it didn’t end well for him. At the end of the day though, this was kinda entertaining, definitely watchable, and i’m giving it 4 stars, same as Ha-Chan with our previous watch. Dowse does a nice job in doing it, and maybe I should see Goon next. But for now, our last feature of the night, absolutely fucking tired as hell, let’s get through it though, Ghost in the Shell (4K Restoration), a way to cap off this triple feature we will be finishing today.
The only part of this movie that got me going was the Rochester mention and Jay Baruchel being aggressively Canadian. The Stunt Driver is a part documentary recreation part fictional “based on a true story” drama to pad out a runtime about Ken Carter, a stunt driver from the 70’s. While I like the presentation style of incorporating documentary footage, a switch between 16mm film, digital cameras and eventually 35mm film to show the change in time and present the recreated doc footage vs the new narrative story. I found it to be tonally all over the place, the story to be repetitive and poorly paced, at 99 minutes this thing really drags in the second half. Jay Baruchel does about as good of as job as he can with this. The goofiness works, but they try to do what felt like a split personality story line at once and I just don’t think he has the chops as an actor. However, Ben Foster highlight of the film in his very minor role as Evel Kneivel. At the end of the day, I wasn’t blown away by it either way. It’s a movie, and I’ll continue to do the work I do, and people can watch this movie and make up their own mind. I’m just mad I missed the first half of Mizzou Miss State for this. But whatever, Buckeyes won and it’s Bills game day eve. 2026 On the Silver Screen2026, My Year In Movies
Dowse has been one of the foremost purveyors of the sweeter, smaller and dorkier Canadian brand of performatively macho masculinity since 2002, so it’s hard to believe there was subject matter this suited to him he hadn’t done yet: a guy who had an NFB documentary made about him because he was willing to die flipping cars in front of an audience of like 100 guys in Peterborough, Ontario. I think the death wish drama itself is a little too sports movie conventional at times, and as always with this kind of movie the wife role is thankless. But Jay is great (wonderful accent and beer gut acting), the hangout humor is pretty consistent, and the recreation of the 70s documentary footage is pretty impressive.Further discussion on ep 451 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS, as part of our TIFF26 coverage.
