Jay Baruchel is back with his "Goon" director Michael Dowse, and this time he's playing a man best known for a stunt he never actually pulled off.

"The Stunt Driver" casts Baruchel as Ken Carter, the Canadian daredevil who spent five years chasing a mile-long rocket-car leap across the St. Lawrence River, a project that ended in injury rather than glory. The film draws directly from "The Devil At Your Heels," the 1981 documentary that first told Carter's story, and even opens the same way the doc did: Carter injured mid-stunt, begging the crowd from a stretcher not to walk out on him.

Variety's review, published Sunday, isn't kind about what the dramatisation adds. The critic argues the movie never justifies its own existence next to the archival original, calling it slower going and, frankly, less enjoyable than the documentary it expands on.

That's not for lack of access. Dowse reportedly got interviews with people who knew Carter and pulled unused footage from the original doc shoot, including a radio interview where Carter was hypnotised. The review says that material gives the film a shot at real vulnerability, but Carter's fears stay one-note even once they're grounded in something real.

Baruchel's Carter talks a lot, and the dialogue is described as far showier than the comparatively quiet man seen in the 1981 footage. There's also a nationalist streak written in that the documentary didn't carry. Carter, per the film, calls rival stuntman Evel Knievel (played by Ben Foster) an unwelcome "yankee doodle dandy," and at one point snarls, "I eat Americans like you for breakfast!" Given the current run of trade friction between the US and Canada, that's not exactly a subtle choice.

The supporting cast includes Ed Helms as engineer Dick Keller, Dan Bakkedahl as sports agent Bill Wilkins, and Marc Beaupré as Danny Lafortune, a fictional stand-in written to replace the real stuntman who eventually took Carter's place on the jump. Laurence Lebouef plays Carter's wife Gloria, though the review notes she's mostly stuck worrying on the sidelines, standard biopic-spouse territory. Joe Coben, playing documentary director Bob Fortier, apparently comes closest to nailing a period voice, in a performance the review compares to Jon Voight's Howard Cosell in "Ali."

Technically, there's real ambition on display. Cinematographer Sara Mishara shoots across three different aspect ratios and multiple film stocks, academy ratio for the restaged documentary scenes, widescreen for new context, and a third format for the climax, all meant to visually separate what the doc showed from what the new film claims to add.

Whether audiences buy that distinction is the real question now. No release date beyond the review has surfaced yet, and until one does, "The Stunt Driver" remains a film measured against the footage it's trying to outdo.