Down­hill

The lat­est high-pro­file (and osten­si­bly point­less) US remake of a for­eign-lan­guage film, Jim Rash and Nat Faxon’s Down­hill is based on Ruben Östlund’s acclaimed 2014 com­e­dy-dra­ma Force Majeure, about a fam­i­ly whose rela­tion­ships with one anoth­er are test­ed dur­ing a ski­ing hol­i­day in the Alps.

Will Fer­rell takes on the cen­tral part of Pete Staunton, whose trip with wife Bil­lie (Julia Louis-Drey­fus) and their two sons Finn and Emer­son descends into chaos after he fails to pro­tect them dur­ing a poten­tial avalanche. Pete’s cow­ardice becomes a stick­ing point for his wife and chil­dren, symp­to­matic of larg­er cracks in their fam­i­ly unit.

Yet where Östlund delved into the psy­chol­o­gy of why a man might act in such a cow­ard­ly way, Rash and Fax­on are more con­cerned with tired car­i­ca­tures of Euro­peans and jokes that nev­er real­ly land. In attempt­ing to bring a lit­tle more gen­der bal­ance, Louis-Drey­fus is giv­en decid­ed­ly more to do than her Östlund-penned coun­ter­part, and while it’s refresh­ing to see her in a siz­able film role, Downhill’s reliance on gen­dered clich­es (the inept hus­band, the bored wife) means she doesn’t have much to do.

Even at a svelte 85 min­utes, Down­hill still man­ages to drag. It feels like the Spar­kNotes ver­sion of Force Majeure, the source mate­r­i­al sim­pli­fied to the point of being bare­ly recog­nis­able. The script is mis­er­ably unfun­ny too, which is sur­pris­ing giv­en that it was co-writ­ten (along­side Rash and Fax­on) by Jesse Arm­strong of Peep Show, Veep and Suc­ces­sion fame.

And while it’s admirable that Fer­rell and Louis-Drey­fus per­formed all their own ski­ing stunts, these two gen­uine com­ic greats are wast­ed here.