At the height of his wacky Olympics fame, the tabloids took an ambiguous, laugh-with/laugh-at line on Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards, the lovable underdog Brit who stole the limelight from serious contenders at the 1988 Winter Olympics, having exploited a technical loophole that allowed him to compete as Team GB’s only ski-jumper – despite being hilariously mediocre at best. The papers finally settled on the celebratory tone that this movie takes up from the outset.
With cheeky hints at Chariots of Fire in the staccato synth soundtrack, and even Billy Elliot in the dialogue (“It’s not like I’m taking up ballet!”), this is a weirdly embellished, fictionalised and mythologised biopic, with Taron Egerton gamely impersonating the bespectacled Olympian. The movie makes him a daft no-hoper before the Games (actually he was a talented sportsman) and even gives Eddie an entirely bizarre fictional American coach, a supposed boozy wreck played by hunky Hugh Jackman, who is himself looking for redemption and resolution of daddy issues, in the form of his own disapproving ex‑coach, played by Christopher Walken: a pointless pair of made-up Americans who upstage Eddie at his moment of glory.
The story of Eddie the Eagle really is fascinating and heartwarming: the one real amateur in a competition supposedly dedicated to the amateur ideal. The film’s heart is in the right place, but Jackman and Walken are all wrong.
