Movie Reaction: Downhill

Formula: Force Majeure - Anchorman

Downhill is a remake of the French dark comedy Force Majeure. Both films share the same basic premise: A family goes on a ski vacation in Switzerland. While at an outdoor restaurant, a controlled avalanche comes way too close to hitting the restaurant. In a moment of panic, the father, Pete (Will Ferrell) gets up and runs for cover, leaving his wife, Bille (Julia Louise-Dreyfus), and sons still at the table, panicking and afraid. When everything turns out to be OK, Pete sheepishly returns to the table. As you can imagine, the rest of the vacation gets pretty awkward after that, and that's the crux of the story. Force Majeure is a perfectly fine movie. I won't be bringing it up again though, because saying all the ways that Downhill does and doesn't compare to it is pretty boring.

On paper, this is brilliant casting. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has spent most of her career calling bumbling men on their shit, even when she's struggling to hold it together herself. If I need someone to belittle another character without seeming cruel, she gets my first call. It's weird that this movie is a remake, because Pete seems like he was written specifically for Will Ferrell. In a way, this is a movie about Will Ferrell being sad that he can't star in a Will Ferrell movie anymore. Pete is a father who misses his life before he had a family. He books the vacation at a fancy hotel with virtually no children rather than the family resort down the street. He's constantly checking his phone to track the adventures of his younger coworker (Zach Woods) and his girlfriend (Zoe Chao) around Europe. His actions during the avalanche close-call literalize a lot of feelings that he barely kept below the surface to begin with.

This movie has many problems, but I think I've narrowed down the single biggest problem: Will Ferrell. I love Will Ferrell. Stranger Than Fiction is my favorite movie of all time (by a significant margin). I think he's a brilliant actor when used correctly. Pete sucks though. He's deceitful. He isn't really present when he's with his family. He doesn't hide how much he wishes his life was different. It's hard to think of a single moment in the movie when he's a good husband or father. My guess is that the movie makes a major miscalculation. It assumes that Ferrell's innate likability can withstand all this; that he has to reeeeeeeealy suck for an audience to even think about not siding with him. In short, the movie assumes that Anchorman Will Ferrell is going to show up on set, but Everything Must Go Will Ferrell showed up instead. And that throws the entire movie off balance. Ferrell ends up being too unlikable. In turn, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss has to fall back on being more of a nagging wife character, which is such a waste of her. Neither end up getting opportunities to throw punchline daggers at each other.

The movie ends with Billie telling Pete that he needs to earn her love and respect back. She isn't just going to give it to him. It's a great sentiment, but it means nothing. It's never clear in this movie why she's with him in the first place. She's a lawyer. She's still getting hit on by attractive ski instructors. The movie never makes a compelling point about why she would've ever ended up with Pete. You don't see that he's able to make or laugh or hear about how he used to be so much more considerate. We find out that they were together for a long time before having kids, so you know he didn't just knock her up or catch her in a desperate situation. It makes no sense why they are together, and that gets in the way of the tension throughout the movie. If the movie only shows us the bad times, it's poor writing to have the audience just assume there were good times before them.

I didn't enjoy this movie because I got nothing out of it. I spent most of the 86-minute runtime waiting for everything to click into place, and it never did. It's a movie that's less enjoyable in hindsight than while you're watching it, which could be spun as me saying "It's very watchable". Some of the things on the fringes of the movie I enjoyed. Miranda Otto is wonderful as a randy hotel concierge. Zach Woods and Zoe Chao are nice as younger avatars of Pete and Billie. Julia Louise-Dreyfus is occasionally off in her own movie, and it's a movie I would've rather watched. Krisofer Hivju gets a delightfully deadpan scene that's used in the trailers. Had the movie given me any reason to root for Will Ferrell at all, that would've helped it dramatically. As is, this was quite a disappointment.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend