Movie Review: Eddie The Eagle

If Jamaicans can bobsled, then Britons can jump.

So says Eddie the Eagle, director Dexter Fletcher’s feel-good Olympic story in the vein of 1993’s perpetually-televised family favourite Cool Runnings.

Like any passable sports story, it features a good-natured underdog. Here it’s real-life ski-jumper Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, played by Taron Egerton; a bespectacled yet endearing dork seeking unlikely entry to the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988.

It also has a reluctant, rascally, burnt-out coach (Hugh Jackman, playing the fictional Bronson Peary) and a series of training montages set to a thumping, synth-driven soundtrack. What else do we need?

Well, just like one of the sports genre’s best entries – The Karate Kid – Eddie the Eagle even finds a metaphorical coaching technique to help whip Eddie into shape. In The Karate Kid, Daniel-san was taught by his master to wax-on, wax-off, in the hopes of instinctively learning martial arts. In this, the metaphor is slightly more adult in nature, with Peary telling Eddie that at the moment of “release” on the end of the ramp, he should, erm, learn forward and think of England.

That’s about as blue as the flick gets though, which is otherwise so kid-friendly it’s practically cartoonish. (Eddie Edwards would even agree. He says the Sean Macauley and Simon Kelton-scripted film is only about 10 per cent accurate.)

Ultimately, there are few surprises in Eddie the Eagle, whether you know the historical story behind it or not.

Egerton, working off an already beloved and oversized cult figure, at times leans into the overbite too much and begins to resemble Ricky Gervais’ Derek, but he has his charms. Jackman hits all the easy, expected beats (to our collective delight), while co-star Tim McInnerny gnaws into his part as a stuffy British Olympic commissioner, to whom Eddie is a constant disruption and disgrace.

Fletcher’s direction is peppy and the film has a crisp, varnished sheen deserving of both its icy setting and its intended young audience.

Most importantly, it gets the butterflies fluttering as Eddie prepares his final Olympic leap on the monstrous 90m ramp, and really, that’s the only tricky jump this movie needs to land.

To think, the 1988 Calgary Olympics were the very same in which the Jamaican bobsled team chased gold. A year later, Taylor Swift was born. Boy, we’re really reaping the benefits of the ‘80s today.

3/5

In cinemas April 21, 2016. Rated PG for sexual references, mild themes and coarse language.