A few weeks ago I was talking about how when the Brits make movies, the great ones are really great and the bad ones are really bad. There never seems to be a middle ground. Well i am glad to say that Chalet Girl hasn't reached the heights of The King's Speech or 127 Hours, more like St Trinian's 2 (actually, it's not as bad as that, but close).
Kim was a rising star on the skateboarding circuit when her mother was killed in a car accident and Kim lost her nerve. Desperately trying to support her debt-ridden father, Kim is offered a job as a chalet girl for a rich banker in the Austrian mountains. Working alongside snobby Georgie, Kim becomes interested in snowboarding and prepares herself for a huge championship worth $25,000, enough to pay off everything back home. She also becomes the object of desire for the banker's son Jonny, who is already engaged.
This is predominantly a 95 minute series of montages with a rock/pop soundtrack interrupted by the occasional scene. We see a montage of Kim cleaning the chalet, Kim practicing her snowboarding on the slopes and in her room, in fact, we see a montage of almost everything apart from her going to the toilet (although in one we do see her cleaning it). Take out the montages and you are probably left with 30 minutes of actual acting and script.
The other thing that seemed to leave a bad taste in the mouth: the current opinions of bankers and their bonus should not (and without any sense of irony) be used as a setting for a British comedy. We are invited into their world, watch them drink £500 bottles of wine, eat caviar, fly around in helicopters, bring their other banker friends to dribble over and make sexist remarks about the chalet girls while having meeting and skiing.
The purports to be a comedy, but there are very few, if any laughs, and the performances from some of the cast (Tamsin Egerton as Georgie, in particular) are close to amateurish. The only saving grace to this film is the likability of Felicity Jones as Kim, who is easily the best thing on offer, and when Bill Nighy (as the banker) and Bill Bailey (as Kim's father) appear. You kind of feel safe in their hands among the montages.
This is a very poor show aimed at teenage girls who can sit with their mobiles out and chat among themselves without missing a thing. It's predictable (you know exactly how it's going to end up) lacking in any comedic value whatsoever and a waste of money that could have gone into making another King's Speech. Dire to the extreme.
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