“DOWNHILL” My rating: C
89 minutes | MPAA rating: R
There’s a chill in the air of “Downhill,” and it’s only partly the result of five feet of perfect white powder.
Set in an Austrian ski resort, the latest from directing duo Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (“The Way Way Back”) offers Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell as vacationing Yanks who see the fissures in their relationship only widened by their high-altitude visit.
Billie and Pete seem pretty average. She’s an attorney and appropriately self-assertive.
He’s some kind of executive who cannot put down his cel phone and tends to plan things out for his family — they have two tweener sons (Julian Gray, Ammon Jacob Ford) — without asking for their input. He maintains a Father-knows-best attitude behind his doofus-y exterior.
This is how they end up at a high-end resort at which the boys are the only kids in sight and the hot tubs tolerate only nude soaking.
Things come to a head when an outdoor lunch is interrupted by a controlled avalanche. The resort operators routinely set off blasts to loosen dangerous snowpack; this time the boiling wall of white comes shooting down the mountain and directly toward the diners.
Billie instinctively grabs her sons and hunkers down behind the table. Pete grabs his phone and hightails it out of there. Turns out it’s a false alarm — just a cloud of mist reaches the visitors — but Pete’s act of cowardice will haunt him ever after.
Butler's Cinema Scene 