The Fall Guy's end-credits stunt reel is so cool, we're not sure why they bothered with the rest of the movie

The Fall Guy is the rare film that peaks only after its credits have begun to roll.

And to be clear, we’re not talking here about that obligatory, wink-y, after-credits scene that ends David Leitch’s new film, the one with Lee Majors and Heather Thomas arriving well after the fact to reprise roles from a TV show that lent a few names, and practically nothing else, to Leitch’s new action-comedy. No, we’re talking about the bit that runs during the credits, which are accompanied by what is, basically, the exact opposite of a blooper reel: Behind-the-scenes footage of the stunt performers the movie spends its whole running time lionizing, professionally executing incredibly complicated filmmaking feats with precision and skill. No bloopers for these folks; in their line of work, as we’ve been quite carefully taught over the last two hours, bloopers get people hurt, or killed.

We can’t speak for your theater—if you saw the film at all, something of a question mark after it scored a somewhat slow opening at the box office this past weekend—but in ours, not a single person got up to leave or hit the bathroom while this incredibly impressive footage played out. It included fantastic car wrecks, guys prepping themselves to get set on fire, massive jumps and falls, etc. We’d been primed for it: After an entire film that emphasizes the importance of the real over the fake—of stunt work over acting, in particular—it was hard to shake the conclusion that The Fall Guy’s behind-the-scenes footage was cooler than the movie itself.

None of which is meant as a drag on Leitch, or stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. (Or especially Winston Duke, who continues his track record of being the most consistently delightful aspect of pretty much every movie he’s in.) The Fall Guy is a perfectly fun movie, provided you protect your brain from trying to take in its convoluted, mild Hollywood satire of a plot. Gosling and Blunt have charisma to spare, something blows up or crashes into something else every few minutes, and the jokes are at least funnier than the ones that peppered the script of Leitch’s last feature, Bullet Train.

But the fact remains that, for all the time the movie spends talking about storytelling—with Leitch executing at least one non-stunt showboat-y sequence about halfway through, involving a use of split-screen—its laser focus on the heroism of its titular stunt guy creates a strange paradox. Sure, it’s fun to see Gosling’s character, Colt Seavers, take hit after hit and keep going. But it’s way cooler to get those glimpses at the end, showing off the actual prowess of the film’s stunt team as they took those hits for real. It’s a bit like the “getting set on fire” version of the old Gene Siskel question, “Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” Is your movie more fun than just watching a clip reel documenting the team of talented stunt performers who actually pull this mayhem off?

It’s a strange tack for a film to take; it’s not every day you see a movie essentially acting as an advertisement for its own future Blu-ray special features. But it also suggests that Leitch—who, like his old John Wick collaborator Chad Stahelski, came up in stunts before making the move to directing—really believes in the message his movie is selling, possibly even to its detriment. It’s an idea that The Fall Guy, which gets increasingly silly as it runs, commits to more than its love story, or its thin send-ups of Hollywood stereotypes: Stunt people really are that cool; cooler than actors, to be sure. So, the movie all but asks, why not just watch them actually be awesome, without all this need to play pretend? We’re not sure it has an answer to that question ready to go, but at least we get those kickass final minutes.