Director: Jalmari Helander
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 110 min.
Five minutes into director Jalmari Helander’s latest, Big Game, and I felt myself transported back to the wonderful Amblin films I grew up on, with just a splash of ’80s-action cheese thrown in for good measure. It’s a ridiculous movie to be sure, but it revels in its ridiculousness and never takes itself too seriously.
Samuel L. Jackson plays the President of the United States, who, due to a betrayal within his secret service team, gets shot out of the sky while traveling on Air Force One and winds up landing in the Finnish wilderness.
As it so happens, a young boy, played by Onni Tommilais, is out on a hunting trip – performing a rite of passage when he discovers the President’s escape pod. Together they must navigate the harsh wilderness while also attempting to evade the terrorists who are trying to kidnap or possibly kill the leader of the free world.
Where Big Game succeeds is in its presentation – which feels decidedly classic, like something we’d get out of the ’80s or ’90s. (Surviving the Game comes to mind.) It’s not overtly attempting to be a throwback or homage to these films, and that’s why it works.
In Helander’s prior film, Rare Exports, the director brought this childlike wonder into a fairly disturbing horror film, making it feel more like Gremlins. There was a lot of carnage taking place, but there was an undeniable charm to it all. He brings this feeling back in Big Game, resulting in a wildly enjoyable adventure film that’s just plain fun.
This theme is in part due to the wonderful score by Juri and Miska Seppä, who also composed the music for Rare Exports. The light, fairytale-like melodies kept the mood from getting too dour, and consistently aided in keeping the tone at just the right octave.
The action set pieces are fun and clever, especially one involving a freezer careening through the forest with Sam Jackson inside, spitting one zinger after another. While the effects work in some of these sequences isn’t great, it hardly detracts from the overall experience. The plane crash at the beginning of the film was surprisingly well done considering this isn’t a giant-budget blockbuster.
Speaking of Sam Jackson, I couldn’t think of an actor better suited for this particular role – a U.S. president stuck out in the wilderness with trained killers hunting him and relying on a 13-year-old boy to keep him alive.
Jackson is funny as ever and was given plenty of scene-chewing dialogue, but his character wasn’t necessarily a badass; he acts exactly how you might expect a politician to react in the situation. This fearfulness gave Tommilais’ character of Oskari the chance to step up and prove to his elders that he has what it takes to be a man.
If you go see Big Game knowing what to expect – a fun, popcorn flick and not some dead-serious, realistic action spectacle – then you’ll leave the theater with a smile on your face and a slightly warmer heart than before you went in. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does provide the type of adventure that I haven’t seen for quite some time in cinema, and for that reason alone, I cannot wait to see what Helander comes up with next.
