Eddie Edwards finishing last in the ski-jumping at the Calgary Winter Olympics of 1988 is one of the most beloved British sporting stories of recent times. We Brits like our sporting heroes eccentric and losers plucky, and the man dubbed “The Eagle” more than fitted the bill.
A big screen version of his story was always going to undergo a fair amount of cinematic embroidering and with director duties handed to Dexter Fletcher, whose debut Wild Bill I enjoyed very much, I expected good things. Unfortunately, what he has concocted is a major disappointment.
Eddie the Eagle (★★, PG, 106 mins) is an underdog story told with the broadest possible strokes, a cartoon in human form. Taron Egerton plays our ski-jumping hero as if he’s a contestant in one of those Cumbrian gurning competitions – there’s little to his performance beyond a stupid facial expression. The supporting cast, including Keith Allen playing Eddie’s dad and Tim McInnerny as a snooty sports administrator, ham it up with relish, but these characters, and the world Fletcher creates, feel utterly bogus. This superficiality is emphasised even further by de facto star of the show, Hugh Jackman, performing as though he’s in a different film from the rest of the cast. His turn as an alcoholic ski-jumping coach is so half-hearted it’s in need of an emergency transplant.
Although the ski-jumping scenes are done well, there is too heavy a reliance on training montages and booming pop music to keep things moving. The larger-than-life approach might have worked if the jokes were plentiful and hilarious. Sadly, they are neither. Like it’s subject, for all its perky enthusiasm Eddie the Eagle falls well short.
Victoria (★★★, 15, 138 mins) achieves a level of technical excellence that Eddie Edwards only dreamed of. Filmed in one take lasting just over two hours, it’s a thriller in which a young Spanish woman, on a night out in Berlin, falls in with a seemingly genial group of lads but soon ends up an accomplice to a dangerous crime.
As a feat of improvisation and endurance (by actors and cameraman), the film is magnificent. Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen inveigles us into the gang by putting his camera right up close to them as they move across the city, from nightclubs and cafés to underground car parks and posh hotels. A twilight world of street lights and dark corners is also beautifully conjured.
It’s a shame, then, that this exciting trip is let down by a fundamental flaw in the plotting. It’s virtually impossible to accept Victoria’s lightning-quick progression from nightclubber to criminal. Brandth Grøvlen and director Sebastian Schipper have created a stunning version of reality, but have erred badly by dropping a barely plausible plot into the middle of it.
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