David Leitch came up through stunt work, and it shows in the best minute of every film he makes: a fight staged so you can see who is standing where. The other two hours are the trouble.
Fi1m perspective
Two hired killers go at each other in the quiet carriage of a train out of Tokyo, and they have to do it in whispers, because a passenger keeps looking up to shush them. That scene in Bullet Train (2022) lasts two minutes and it is the whole of David Leitch's talent in one place: a small room, a couple of bodies and a rule they cannot break. We laughed out loud, properly, and the reason is that Leitch knows from the inside how a fight is built, so he knows that making the fighters stay quiet makes it funnier. Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir cut it to the shushes rather than the punches, and the film never tops it.
He was a stunt performer and coordinator from the late 1990s, doubling for Brad Pitt among others, and ran second unit on Captain America: Civil War and Jurassic World before co-directing John Wick (2014) with Chad Stahelski, without a credit. The solo films came after: Atomic Blonde (2017), Deadpool 2 (2018), Hobbs & Shaw (2019), Bullet Train and The Fall Guy (2024). Jonathan Sela has shot four of them. The stairwell fight in Atomic Blonde, staged to look like a single take, is still the best thing he has done, and it is telling that it is a sequence and not a film.
Because the films around the sequences are where he struggles. Bullet Train has a likeable first hour and then the flashbacks pile up, the villain is explained a third time and the effects department takes the train. The Fall Guy, his tribute to his old trade, is the gentlest of his films and the one we like most, largely because Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are good company; its mystery plot is the least interesting thing in it and it stays twenty minutes too long. Even its fights lack the clean line of John Wick, where you always knew where everyone was standing. Leitch has said that you start a fight scene by asking "What are we learning about this character at the moment", and in the best two minutes of each film he means it. Then somebody has to explain the plot again.
He has another one coming, How to Rob a Bank, still in post-production as we write. We would like it to be ninety minutes long and to trust its quiet carriage. Until then: The Fall Guy for Gosling and Blunt, Bullet Train for the whispering, Atomic Blonde for the stairs, and in each case a clear idea of when to leave.
Biography
David Leitch is an American filmmaker, stunt performer and stunt coordinator. He began his career performing stunts, including doubling for Brad Pitt on several films, before moving into stunt coordination and second unit direction.
Leitch co-directed John Wick (2014) with Chad Stahelski, though only Stahelski received credit. He has since directed Atomic Blonde (2017), Deadpool 2 (2018), Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019), Bullet Train (2022) and The Fall Guy (2024), on which he also served as producer. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and is married to producer Kelly McCormick.
