Eddie the Eagle

Dexter Fletcher – 2016 – England

As far as making inspirational sports films goes, it’s hard to ever do anything very original because the requirements are so strict if you want to end up with an acceptable crowd-pleaser; possibly stricter than in any other sub-genre.  Stray too far in one direction or another, whether it’s towards realism or towards fantasy, and you alienate the type of audience member whose primary reason for disliking movies is that “it wasn’t what I expected.”  Eddie the Eagle –  generously fictionalized, from what I understand – hits every beat that such films are supposed to, and I don’t know if it does so much better than other films, but whatever the formula is, it seems to get everything right, at least well enough to crack its way into the black heart of a cynical filmgoer like me.  It tells the story of Eddie Edwards, the amateur ski jumper with Olympic dreams who became an unlikely star of the 1988 winter games.  Edwards is relentlessly portrayed as such an extreme underdog that his triumph is an exhilarating relief despite being laboriously inevitable.  I don’t know much about the real Edwards, but his movie incarnation is beset with every obstacle imaginable; social awkwardness, lack of formal training, lack of money, unsympathetic family, a washed-up coach, contemptuous officials who plot against him, snooty fellow athletes who shun him, severe physical injury, and even (what seems to be) a slight mental deficiency.  A major factor in this film’s success has to be the remarkable performance of Taron Egerton as Eddie.  I completely failed to recognize him even though I had recently seen him as a cardboard character in a cardboard movie; Kingsman: The Secret Service, which I hated with a passion.  Egerton, whom I would never have taken seriously before, pulls off something pretty amazing here; not only transforming himself physically, but disappearing so into the character that I honestly believed they must have cast an untrained actor who just happened to have the same ticks and quirks as the character on the written page.  Like I said, throw a dart anywhere near this movie and you will strike a well-worn sports movie cliché.  All I can say is that, somehow, director Fletcher manages to make everything so light and warm and emotionally genuine that, after a while, you don’t mind being jerked through a textbook sample of Screenwriting 101.  I suppose the difference is that most movies try to be “by the book” and fail horribly, whereas a select few pull it off.  Granted, being as trite and predictable as humanly possible probably isn’t the highest goal an artist should aspire to, but it is what it is.  So yes, I smiled, I laughed, and once or twice might have had to get something out of my eye, against all better judgment.  It’s as if seeing a magic act when you know exactly how the tricks are done but the show is so good that you clap like an idiot anyway and don’t mind being conned out of your money.