Even though buddy cop action films may hold the crown for
the most widely recognised clichés, they still
don’t hold much of a candle to the oddity that is the inspirational sports
movie. The wide-eyed innocent of the genre family, it walks this weird divide
where it is often based on actual events and yet is easily one of the most
fantastical forms of drama (or dramedy, as a lot of these turn out) out there.
Don’t get me wrong, films like the Rocky series show that gritty realism is
just as welcome in this sector of filmmaking… when they aren’t inserting helper
robots and Russian super soldiers into the narrative, that is. We’ve even
looked at a few of these before like Paper Planes and last year’s update of the
Rocky canon with Creed; between them, we have a pretty decent spectrum of what
could be expected from a film like this. Needless to say, this is very much in
the former category this time, but maybe that need not be such a bad thing.
This is Eddie The Eagle.
