THIS feel-good little movie purports to tell how Michael “Eddie” Edwards became the first Pom to represent Britain in ski-jumping at the 1988 Winter Olympics.

Eddie was already British amateur ski-jumping record holder and world number nine amateur speed skier. In their screenwriting debuts, Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton set director Dexter Fletcher’s film in motion with Eddie (Taron Egerton) telling his parents that he’s decided to compete at the Olympics.

So off he goes to Germany to train. There he meets morose, alcoholic American former ski-jumping champion Bronson Peary, who agrees to coach him. Peary is a total invention by the writers. For Hugh Jackman, playing him is a doddle.

The European locations may not be exactly what the film purports to be showing us, but exteriors are these days seldom authentic. Apparently the Olympic ski-jumping sequences were filmed in Austria, not Calgary, Canada.

The screenplay presents British officials as poltroons, British crowds as so starved for sporting heroes that they rejoice excessively at Eddie’s every success and British Olympians as so mean-spirited toward Eddie that they try to sabotage his preparations.

The action sequences look real enough, bespeaking some clever camera placement. The film leaves us with mixed feelings about Eddie, who by all accounts is a fame-seeker by whatever means (in December 2013, he competed unsuccessfully in a celebrity edition of the BBC quiz show “Eggheads”.) Egerton’s portrayal of him wins no prizes.

At all cinemas