Was Ken Carter a great Canadian hero? No, not really. He was a fascinating yet deeply flawed man who deserves to be remembered. In the 1970s, Carter was a small-time Canadian stunt driver who dreamed of becoming an international superstar by jumping a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental across the St. Lawrence River. Ironically, he’s best remembered today for that jump he never actually made.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2026, ‘The Stunt Driver’ is a fictionalized account of Carter’s remarkable story. Director Michael Dowse reunites with Jay Baruchel, whom he previously directed in the hockey comedy ‘Goon’. Baruchel stars as the Mad Canadian, alongside Ed Helms of ‘The Office’ as rocket engineer Dick Keller.
Carter desperately wanted fame, fortune and the public’s admiration. He was painfully jealous of Evel Knievel, who had millions of fans, television specials and kids playing with his action figures, while Ken was stuck doing stunts during intermission at small-town stock car tracks. When Knievel’s legendary Snake River Canyon jump (as parodied in Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky” video) failed in 1974, Carter saw his opportunity to do something even bigger. He dismissed Knievel’s attempt because he’d used a rocket instead of a motorcycle. Carter was a stunt driver, and he intended to jump a car across the St. Lawrence River. It would have four wheels and a steering wheel, just like every other stunt car he’d driven. This one just happened to have a rocket engine.
Everyone around Carter tells him the jump is impossible, that he’ll almost certainly kill himself. But he’s long since crossed the line from determination into obsession. He refuses to abandon his dream, willing to sacrifice his safety, finances, marriage and probably his life to make it happen. Carter doesn’t merely want to complete the jump. He wants to become a legend, surpass Evel Knievel and prove himself to the world. Yet beneath all that swagger is a desperately insecure man who needs the public’s admiration to feel successful.
Carter’s reputation as a daredevil was built on an image of absolute fearlessness. Jumping a dozen cars in a beat-up old Plymouth with little more than a crash helmet and seat belt was just another Saturday night for the Mad Canadian. But beneath the bravado was a frightened man who worried he’d be forgotten. So he dreamed up the most outrageous stunt imaginable, spent years finding financial backers, building an enormous ramp and developing a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. He even attracted the attention of ABC’s Wide World of Sports. This was supposed to be his ticket to immortality.
The whole idea was absolutely insane. Carter planned to launch a car off a ramp at nearly 300 mph, fly across a mile of open water, then somehow return safely to earth. There were parachutes to slow the car down and even talk of landing in a bed of roses. But this wasn’t a cartoon! Carter spent years figuring out how to get his rocket car into the air, but apparently not as much time on the landing. Gravity doesn’t care how famous you want to be.
Jay Baruchel does an excellent job portraying Carter as a walking contradiction, equal parts confidence and cowardice. But seeing the thin-as-a-rail actor portraying the pudgy stuntman with what looks like a pillow stuffed under his shirt is ridiculous. Baruchel delivers a solid performance, but he needed to pack on another 50 pounds to make the casting believable. Director Michael Dowse mixes fictionalized scenes with actual documentary footage, even switching aspect ratios to distinguish the archival footage from the dramatized story. Several real people are combined into fictional characters, and the timeline is compressed to make the story more dramatic. But those liberties help tell a compelling story about a man whose single-minded determination has completely consumed his life.
The real problem with the movie comes in the third act, when jump day arrives and Ken Carter chickens out. The movie makes it look like Carter came up with one excuse after another, from sunrise to sundown, to avoid jumping. The next morning, he’s replaced. In reality, the delays stretched over weeks, and his financial backers eventually became convinced he’d lost his nerve. After years of press conferences, promotion and promises, the man who’d spent his career cheating death couldn’t bring himself to attempt his greatest stunt. Instead, another driver climbed into the rocket car and made the jump. In the movie, that driver is the fictional Danny Lafortune, whose spectacular failure nearly kills him.
Was Carter vindicated when the rocket car failed to make it across the river? Of course not! The stunt was a ridiculous idea from the beginning, and the disastrous attempt proved just how dangerous it really was. But that doesn’t erase the years Carter spent telling everyone how brave he was, only to lose his nerve when it finally mattered. Dowse leaves audiences wondering whether Carter’s decision not to jump was an admission of defeat or an act of courage. Maybe it was both. Dude talked a good game but just didn’t have the conviction to follow through.
Perhaps that’s the real tragedy of Ken Carter. He wanted so badly to be remembered as the world’s greatest stunt driver that he lost sight of how dangerous, impractical and downright stupid his dream had become. He ultimately became famous for something he never accomplished. Not a great Canadian hero, but certainly an unforgettable Canuck. And maybe that’s enough.
Tomorrow, Fast Film Friday separates fact from fiction with ‘The Devil at Your Heels’ (1981), the National Film Board documentary that captured Carter’s impossible dream as it unfolded.