* * *
EDDIE THE EAGLE
Directed by Dexter Fletcher, with Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman, Christopher Walken and Jo Hartley
REVIEW: John DeFore
MOST moviegoers don’t know the story of Eddie Edwards, the plasterer who managed to represent Great Britain in the 1988 Olympic ski-jumping contest despite a startling lack of athletic prowess.
And they won’t quite know it even after Eddie the Eagle, which takes tremendous liberties with the actual facts. But the essence of what made the man inspiring to so many – it’s not the winning, but the effort that’s important – comes through with gonglike clarity in Fletcher’s film, a straight-down-the-ramp sports tale that plays to the average man’s dreams of momentary greatness.
With Hugh Jackman as Eddie’s coach, multiplex doors are open to the ingratiating pic, though it may not be greeted quite as warmly elsewhere as it was in this ski town at a “secret” Sundance screening.
Steve Coogan was once slated to play the gawky, eccentric Eddie; a few years later, Rupert Grint had the gig. But in the end it went to Taron Egerton, fresh from Kingsman: The Secret Service and ready for a major change from that film’s wannabe Bond glamour. Here, he wears awkward, ill-fitting glasses and screws his face up as if suffering from a mild palsy, playing a man who dreamed of being an Olympian from childhood but proved incompetent at every sport he tried.
As Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton’s script has it, Eddie finally got passably good at downhill skiing, but when the time came to pick Britain’s 1988 team, he was just too big a klutz.
But when he learned of antiquated rules that made it much easier to get on the bill as a ski-jumper than a regular skier – the nation had no ski-jump ramps, so competition was nonexistent – he decided to qualify in that category. Though he’d never jumped in his life.
The real Edwards in fact had considerably more experience, and had stunt-jumped over buses and cars, but that’s not a good enough story for Eagle, which gets most of its mileage out of looking up at big ramps and treating them like frontiers of unthinkable difficulty. Eddie faces these challenges in Garmisch, Germany, where he meets the fictional Bronson Peary (Jackman), a onetime US Ski Team star who was kicked out by also-fictional coach Warren Sharp (Christopher Walken).
These days, Peary drives a snowplow and drinks his breakfast from a whiskey bottle. He’s disgusted by Eddie’s attempts to teach himself how to jump, but in the way of underdog sports films, he soon comes around, if only to keep the stupid kid from killing himself.
And now it’s time for a Hall & Oates training montage, in which the grouchy vet imparts ski-jump wisdom to his student, who has stolen his dad’s van and borrowed the family’s savings from Mom in order to pay for his attempts to qualify for the Olympics.
Spoiler alert: He qualifies, and his performance there endears him to home viewers and the press to an extent sure to rile athletes who’ve been training since they were five.
Egerton lays the I’m-a-dork routine on awfully thick in the film’s first act, but the performance gets easier to take as the film goes on — perhaps mellowing in the presence of Jackman. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter