Eddie the Eagle Review

Nothing here will surprise anyone who has seen a sports film before, and the picture knows it. Dexter Fletcher runs the underdog formula without a single detour: the doubting father, the sneering federation, the drunk coach with a past, the training montage, the crowd coming round. What saves it is Taron Egerton, who plays Eddie Edwards with a jutting jaw, thick glasses and a permanent squint, a physical performance that could easily have curdled into mockery and never does.

He plays the man as stubborn rather than stupid, which is the correct and harder reading. Matthew Margeson's synth score does a lot of unearned emotional work, and the jumps themselves are shot with enough vertigo from the top of the ninety metre hill to make the fear legible. The trouble is Bronson Peary, a coach invented wholesale for the film, a composite of nobody, who exists to give Eddie someone to argue with and to supply a redemption arc the story does not need.

Jackman is charming in the role and the role is cardboard. The real Edwards was funnier and stranger than this, and the film sands him down into something safe for a family audience.