David Leitch
David Leitch is a director, born 1975.
Leitch spent more than a decade as a stunt performer and coordinator, doubling and falling and getting hit, with small on-screen parts in In Hell, The Dukes of Hazzard, Ninja Assassin and Escape Plan. He co-directed John Wick in 2014 with Chad Stahelski, though only Stahelski took the credit, and between them the two changed how American action is shot: wide, held long, with the actor visibly doing the thing.
His solo films kept the choreography and traded some of the discipline for volume. Atomic Blonde is the best of them, and its stairwell fight is the argument for the whole method: one apparently unbroken take in which both fighters get slower, clumsier and more desperate, because the point is that violence is exhausting. Nothing since has been that pure. Deadpool 2 is funnier than it is coherent. Hobbs & Shaw is a product. Bullet Train is a very expensive comedy set on a train, and it works in roughly half its scenes.
The Fall Guy in 2024 finally says out loud what all of it has been about: a stunt performer as a romantic lead, in a film that stops repeatedly to show you how the trick is done. He has a Screen Actors Guild award as part of a stunt ensemble, which is a rarer object on a director's shelf than an Oscar, and How to Rob a Bank follows in 2026.
Movies (21)
- Deadpool 2 (2018)
- Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
- Bullet Train (2022)
- The Fall Guy (2024)
- Ninja Assassin (2009)
- The Mechanic (2011)
- In Hell (2003)
- Escape Plan (2013)
- Atomic Blonde (2017)
- Next (2007)
- The Dukes of Hazzard (2005)
- How to Rob a Bank (2026)
- Once Upon a Deadpool (2018)
- King of Iron Fist Tournament
- The King of Fighters (2009)
- Wick Is Pain (2025)
- The Order (2001)
- Deadpool: No Good Deed (2017)
- Confessions of an Action Star (2005)
- Ocean's Fourteen
- Nine Lives (2002)
TV (1)
Where to start with David Leitch
Take Atomic Blonde before the rest. Its plot is warmed-over Cold War business and it does not matter, because the fight sequences are the best in his filmography and the film is willing to let its lead look genuinely damaged.
The Fall Guy is the second stop and the most likeable thing he has made, an affectionate film about the people who actually do the falling. Bullet Train is the maximalist one: too long, too pleased with itself, and containing four or five sequences good enough to justify the ticket.
Deadpool 2 is the biggest hit and the least characteristic, since the jokes rather than the choreography set its pace. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is the pure studio assignment and can be skipped without loss.
His uncredited co-direction of the first John Wick is missing from this catalogue, which is a shame, because that is the film that explains his method. If you want the years before he directed, The King of Fighters has him on screen as Terry Bogard, and it is exactly as bad as that sounds.