Don’t expect an avalanche of laughs in DOWNHILL.

Although it stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, DOWNHILL makes for uphill enjoyment despite its under ninety minute run time.

Inspired by Ruben Ostland’s 2014 Swedish tour de force, FORCE MAJEURE, this pointless remake teams Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell as Billie and Pete, husband and wife Americans on a skiing holiday in Austria with their two sons.

A potentially fatal incident uncovers Pete’s cowardice and creates a fissure that grows into a crevasse, splitting the family bond that was tenuous from the start.

Pete is inept in every way and one wonders why smart legal eagle Billie would stay with the dill.

Probably for the sake of the children which were conceived through science. She seems much more invested in the boys than he is, to the point that he is a broody bystander more interested in workmates than his kids.

Wounded male pride makes for Pete’s petulance, his progeny not naturally conceived, so his stake-hold in parenting is impoverished. His abandonment of his family in pursuit of personal safety is the icing on this left out in the rain cake.

Miranda Otto is amusing as a robust and forthright resort manager – did the filmmakers mistake Australian for Austrian in the casting? – succeeding in making a European caricature the funniest thing in the picture.

Volker Bertelman’s score is interesting with echoes of yodelling and cuckoo and the magnificent location of the Austrian Alps makes for majestic visuals.

For all that, DOWNHILL reinforces ugly Americanism, their jingoistic arrogance, homogenised lifestyle and their putrid, puerile Puritan prudery.

It’s downhill all the way.