Eddie the Eagle (2016)
Directed by Dexter Fletcher
The feel-good story of Michael 'Eddie' Edwards, an unlikely but courageous British ski-jumper who never stopped believing in himself—even as an entire nation was counting him out. With the help of a rebellious and charismatic coach, Eddie takes on the establishment and wins the hearts of sports fans around the world by making an improbable and historic showing at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
30 connections found
View:
30 films that influenced Eddie the Eagle
What critics say influenced Eddie the Eagle
The Canadian cold has already inspired 1993's Cool Runnings, the warmly comic tale of the Jamaican bobsled team, and now it's produced Dexter Fletcher's Eddie the Eagle, a less than subtle biopic about the finest – that is, only – British ski jumper of his generation.
Not only did the Calgary Games produce the phenom of the Jamaican bobsled team — immortalized in the cheerful 1993 Disney movie “Cool Runnings” — but a bumbling bundle of fan catnip named Michael “Eddie” Edwards, the first British athlete to compete in the Olympic ski-jump competition, and an instant symbol of innocence, perseverance and irrepressible can-do-ism.
There’s a pat quality to all this that recalls lots of previous movies, including “Cool Runnings,” Jon Turteltaub’s surprise 1993 hit about the unlikely success of the Jamaican bobsled team in the same 1988 games.
The others were 1992’s The Cutting Edge and 1993’s Cool Runnings, both of which are about unlikely competitors achieving greatness (although The Cutting Edge was as much a romance as a sports movie).
Hell, this isn’t even the first movie about a plucky underdog at those Olympics; Calgary ’88 was the year that gave us Cool Runnings’ Jamaican bobsled team (who get a winking in-joke reference in Eddie).
Disney may be king of the underdog sports drama, but actor-turned-director Dexter Fletcher aims to beat the studio at its own game with this inspirational true story that’s equal parts “Rudy” and “Cool Runnings.”
By the time “Bolero” pops up on the soundtrack, well, you’re more than primed for the slow motion jump, with Eddie’s very intent facial expression.
Directed with fittingly broad strokes by Dexter Fletcher, “Eddie the Eagle” may or may not become another “Billy Elliot,” but it ought to mark Egerton (“Kingsman: The Secret Service”) as an actor worth watching.
Actually, though, in movie terms, Eddie the Eagle is almost exactly like that: if “Billy Elliot on skies” was not part of the pitch meeting, I can’t imagine what else got the greenlight for this almost entirely fictional biopic of the unlikely English ski-jumper, who exploited the loophole of no actual British ski-jumping team existing, then finished dead last as a goofy crowd favorite.
The script is peppered with on-the-nose comparisons to previous underdogs, especially the bobsled shenanigans of Cool Runnings and Billy Elliot's yearning.
There's a long and successful strain of British films about unlikely outcasts following their dreams, including Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot, where a coal-miner's son pursues a passion for ballet, and Eddie the Eagle neatly sets up the familiar dynamic of parental doubt and wider disbelief.
That's a real surprise, considering this brand of story — the plucky nobody who unexpectedly excels at sports — has been with us since the days of silent cinema, when Harold Lloyd proved himself to be a gangly gridiron great in the uproarious 1925 comedy classic The Freshman.
Advertisement
Yet, it is assembled with such love for its central character and his determined mission, its seams held together by an upbeat synthesizer score that sounds like outtakes from the Rocky IV (1986) soundtrack, that you’d have to be pretty cynical yourself not to feel some tingling of excitement when Eddie soars, even if he lands many, many meters behind the competition.
(It would not be surprising to find out that Rocky IV was a major influence here.)
Egerton has real range: he is unrecognizable here compared to his working-class spy in Kingsman: The Secret Service , and neither character looks anything like his soft WWI-era intellectual turned soldier in Testament of Youth .
But in 1987, the year before the Winter Games in Calgary, Canada, the British Olympic Association Committee doesn’t want anything to do with the awkward Eddie (Egerton, of “Testament of Youth” ) and bans him from joining the team.
The others were 1992’s The Cutting Edge and 1993’s Cool Runnings, both of which are about unlikely competitors achieving greatness (although The Cutting Edge was as much a romance as a sports movie).
The sniveling upper-crust dick who stands in Eddie’s way doesn’t feel like your average movie stuffed shirt; he’s written and played like Ted Knight in Caddyshack, or the antagonist in the ‘80s snobs-vs.-slobs…
Advertisement
Egerton’s character still strikes viewers as an endearing picture of hope, all awkward mannerisms, owlish glasses, and a jaw jut that might be the most committed actorly facial contortion since Billy Bob Thornton in “Sling Blade.”
British obsessiveness in the face of reason can make for fascinating drama – consider David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai – and it simplifies the triumph, and personal ramifications, of Eddie's celebrated turn at Calgary.