We've all seen inspirational sports movies involving football, basketball, baseball and hockey, and now we've got one involving America's favorite past time, ski jumping! Okay so maybe ski jumping isn't a sport on a lot of peoples radar, but the movie Eddie the Eagle is pretty inspirational.
Eddie the Eagle tells the true story of Eddie Edwards (Taron Egerton), a British skier in the 1980s who decided he wanted to be that countries first Olympic ski jumper since the 1920s. The problem was that he was not very good and Great Britain's Olympic committee thought he was a disgrace to the country. Eddie's live long dream has been to be an Olympic athlete so he decides to train on his own and qualify for the Olympics. While training he catches the eye of Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman) who tells Eddie he is nuts and is going to get himself killed. Eddie doesn't let that stop him and he just keeps working at it. Bronson soon becomes willing to help train Eddie just because Bronson sees how determined Eddie is at achieving his life long goal of being an Olympic athlete.
The most enjoyable thing about Eddie the Eagle is just how positive and inspirational it is. Eddie is constantly having people, including his own father, telling him he won't ever make it and he should just give up. Eddie never second guesses himself, he is 100% positive he can achieve his goal no matter what gets in his way. In the last scene of the movie, you are sitting there sitting on pins and needles wondering will Eddie achieve his goal and prove people wrong. The performances by Taron and Hugh were great. They both seemed like they enjoyed this project and were passionate about telling the story.
The main negative about Eddie the Eagle is that it plays it pretty safe. The movie doesn't take any challenges that make it stand out above other sports movies like Hoosiers, Rudy and Rocky. It doesn't show us anything we haven't seen a million times before other than being an unconventional sport to most Americans. Also some of the special effects when the ski jumping was taking place was pretty distracting because of how bad it looked.
Eddie the Eagle is a fun and inspirational sports film that we have seen before just with a different setting. It's entertaining and you will enjoy watching it but you will probably not need to see it revisit it once you have seen it.
3 1/2 Stars
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