At last, Eddie the Eagle takes flight in a comedy full of heart: Film about the ski jumper's triumph as sporty underdog soars, says BRIAN VINER 

Eddie The Eagle (PG) 

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The story of ski jumper Michael ‘Eddie’ Edwards is already well known to those of us old enough to remember the 1988 Winter Olympics.

With his thick glasses and prominent underbite, Eddie was no one’s idea of an athlete. Except in his own mind, that is.

Doughty for taking part, but doomed to finish last, he is the perfect subject for a movie about a sporting underdog. And, of course, it could only have one title.

The surprising thing is that Eddie The Eagle has taken this long to reach the screen. But fittingly, getting it made was a battle against the odds.

Taron Egerton, 26, gives a 'hugely engaging' performance as Eddie the Eagle, says Brian Viner

Writer Sean Macaulay (with whom, by way of disclosure, I worked at The Mail on Sunday a couple of decades ago) has been attached to the project for 14 years, during which several potential Eddies, including Steve Coogan, Rupert Grint and Ricky Gervais, have come and gone. 

Eddie himself once told me in an interview that he thought Sean Penn would be perfect.

Typically, he then realised he meant Simon Pegg.

In the event, the hugely engaging screen Eddie is Taron Egerton.

Nicely directed by Dexter Fletcher, it’s a lovely film full of heart. Like most sporting biopics, it plays fast and loose with the facts — for instance, by inventing a coach, Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), who was once a ski jumper before sliding into alcoholism and earning the contempt of his mentor (Christopher Walken).

But that adds a neat redemptive dimension to the story as Peary helps Eddie to confound the snooty mandarins at the British Olympic Association, who consider him an embarrassment, as do most of his haughty team-mates,.

Eddie and his fictional coach, Bronson Peary (played by Hugh Jackman) celebrating at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics

Eddie also confounds his father (Keith Allen), who thinks he’s fit only to become a plasterer in the family business. From boyhood, when he needed calipers to be able to walk, he has dreamt of being an Olympian, and ski-jumping offers an unlikely opportunity, since no one else in Britain does it.

But this particular dream requires guts. Fletcher does a great job of conveying just how terrifying it is even to stand at the top of an Olympic ski jump, let alone take off from one. 

Roman Morse with a heavy load to bear 

Risen (12A)

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Nicely in time for Easter, here’s a film about the Resurrection of Christ that plays out like a police procedural.

This might sound like the basis for a comedy sketch, and there are certainly moments when it’s impossible not to think of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, but the premise sort of works.

Joseph Fiennes plays a Roman tribune, Clavius, the capable and dutiful right-hand man to the irascible, world-weary Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth). Clavius oversees the Crucifixion of a Jewish spiritual leader, Yeshua (Cliff Curtis), and then must ensure the body is not stolen by his disciples.

Joseph Fiennes plays Roman tribune Clavius in a retelling of the resurrection which has 'integrity' and is 'event leavened now and again with wit' 

But the body does go missing, whereupon Risen transubstantiates into an extended episode of Morse, with Lucius (Tom Felton) as Clavius’s Sergeant Lewis.

Painstakingly, they interrogate those who consorted with Yeshua and try to work out what on earth might have happened to the corpse.

But in the end there is no explanation other than the miraculous, and Clavius, having witnessed Yeshua curing a leper on the shores of Galilee, joins the ranks of the earliest Christians.

It is too easy in this day and age to be cynical about a film like this. For me, it tells the story of the Resurrection with integrity, even leavened now and again with wit.

Director Kevin Reynolds, who gave us a Robin Hood from California in the form of Kevin Costner, does a better job with a Messiah who looks passably Middle Eastern. We’ll excuse the gentle English accents.