Eddie the Eagle review

It’s not necessarily a terrible thing when a movie perfectly exemplifies the genre it’s working in. Such is the case with “Eddie the Eagle” -  a wholesome, underdog sports movie that ticks every box expected in that kind of narrative. There’s nothing new or surprising about the way the plot develops but it’s confidently told and competently made, and sometimes that’s just enough effort to keep an audience satisfied. Despite the training montages, the corny humor, and and gee-golly innocents it exudes, “Eddie the Eagle” is a very satisfying movie. 

Matthew Vaughn, director of genre defying, post-modern send-ups like “Stardust,” “Kick-Ass” and last year’s gleefully subversive teen-spy movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” somehow produced this sincere throwback, based on the true story of an unskilled English underclassman who finagled his way into the 1988 Olympics. Kingsman’s Taron Egerton plays Eddie, an enthusiastic Brit with ambitions to compete, despite never receiving any formal training or encouragement to do so. His father would rather his son learn a useful trade while his mother politely indulged Eddie’s fantasies. After trying sports and failing to master them, Eddie learns that nobody has competed on behalf of England in the field of competitive ski-jumping, thus sending him to Norway to learn the skill well enough to qualify within a short window of time. There he meets Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), a drunk groundskeeper who just happened to be an ex-Olympian who ski-jumped for America in the 1970s. 

As previously warned, this movie hits every sports movie cliche;  the young ambitious underdog meets a world-weary and damaged pro and in working together the novice athlete learns the value of sportsmanship and victory while the older man rediscovers his original love of the game. It’s all there. We also have period-specific 80s pop-music and broad victory metaphors that are called back to repeatedly. And yet, every one of these paint-by-numbers elements are perfectly realized and actually pay off in the way they were originally intended.

What elevates the storytelling is the wonderful character choices by Egerton, that include many physical affectations and an unusual mumble-through-his-teeth accent, without the character becoming too cartoonish or losing credibility as a real person. Egerton and Jackman have great screen chemistry and the juxtaposition between Eddie’s acceptance to compete without contending and Peary’s frustration in Eddie’s resolve to likely finish in last place speaks to how the British class system differs from the American exceptionalism. 

Director Dexter Fletcher made this film with a lot heart and it manages to beat through familiar plot mechanics. Plots, overall, are not that important as long as they make sense within the context of the story. A movie’s success usually has more to do with how well film portrays a  character’s emotional state than it does with the ways a script decides to get them from act-1 to act-3. “Eddie the Eagle” is an unabashedly traditional film without a shred of self-referential cynicism and ultimately the warmth and confidence in that choice becomes the film's most unique quality. 

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2016

Listen to more discussion about "Eddie the Eagle" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.