The thrill of victory.
(2016) Sports Biography (20th Century Fox) Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman, Jo Hartley, Keith Allen, Tim McInnerny, Edvin Endre, Iris Berben, Mads Sjøgárd Pettersen, Rune Temte, Mark Benton, Daniel Ings, Christopher Walken, Ania Sowinski, Graham Fletcher-Cook, Paul Reynolds, Jim Broadbent, Matt Rippy. Directed by Dexter Fletcher
Sometimes the whole of something can be greater than the sum of its parts. Movies definitely fit within that realm. Sometimes you watch a movie and realize that the individual elements you’re seeing aren’t particularly noteworthy, but when the movie’s over you realize that you enjoyed it a lot more than you thought you would.
Michael “Eddie” Edwards (Egerton) has dreamed of being an Olympian ever since he was a boy. Not terribly gifted athletically, he trained as hard as he could but was usually sniggered at and told to give up by anyone who had a mouth – which is a lot of people in Britain. Determined to achieve his dream much to the exasperation of his dad (Allen) who is a good-hearted soul who can’t understand his son’s crazy obsession, he decides that because there were no British ski jumpers that if he could master that skill, he could make the Olympic team that way.
There’s just one little roadblock; Eddie has never ski jumped before. That’s not a problem though; he heads to Austria to train and while there meets Bronson Peary (Jackman), a champion American ski jumper who was himself once an Olympian but had messed up a promising career much to the disgust of Warren Sharp (Walken), the legendary coach who was Peary’s mentor and to whom Peary was his greatest disappointment.
Now having crawled inside a bottle, Peary is at first uninterested and downright hostile about the idea of coaching Eddie but his goofy charm and sheer determination to risk everything for this one dream eventually wins Peary over. And the obstacles set in front of Eddie at near-impossible, even though early on he sets the British record for a 70m jump.
However, he has no choice but to make it on his own since nobody is going to help him and against all odds, he must scratch and claw his way to Calgary for the 1988 games. He knows it will be his one shot at Olympic glory, even if not everyone has quite the same definition of what glory might be.
On paper, there is no way I should be liking this movie. Every sports underdog movie cliché is here, from the bromance to the lead character apparently giving up, to the triumph of the final moment. Everything is here almost to a T without a whole lot of variation. These are usually the kinds of movies I can’t stand, for heaven’s sake. And yet, I found myself reeled in by its offbeat charm.
Egerton, who hadn’t really impressed me much in Kingsman: The Secret Service, is far more powerful here. It’s a difficult job because Edwards is such a hero in Britain and his look and mannerisms are well known there; here in the States, not so much. I get the sense we get the spirit of Eddie Edwards much more than the actual person here.
Which leads me to the most serious issue here; almost all of the information here about Eddie Edwards is untrue. Portrayed here as a complete novice, he actually had been skiing for some time and had been the last person eliminated from the men’s downhill team; he saw ski jumping as an alternate way to make the team. There was no Bronson Peary, no Warren Sharp and the unorthodox training that is portrayed here is a far cry from the way Edwards actually trained. His life story has been so filtered and fictionalized that they might as well have made it a fictional character; it must be somewhat demeaning to find out that you are not interesting enough to have your real life story told in your biography.
And yet I still ended up enjoying the movie. This isn’t the Eddie Edwards story, no – but it is a story that appeals to all of us, those of us who think that by wanting something badly enough and by being willing to work hard, overcome every obstacle and always stay true to your own dream that you can accomplish anything. That part of the Eddie Edwards story they got right.
REASONS TO GO: Hits all the right notes. Egerton and Jackman both have charisma and charm.
REASONS TO STAY: Fudges with the facts way too much. Carries every cliché in the book.
FAMILY VALUES: Some partial nudity, a bit of sexually suggestive material and a fair amount of smoking.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Edwards failed to qualify for the 1994 and 1998 Olympics once the BOA raised the standards of qualification for the event; those standards were nicknamed the “Eddie the Eagle Rule” by the committee that instituted them.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 3/14/16: Rotten Tomatoes: 76% positive reviews. Metacritic: 53/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Invincible
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: The Wave
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