If Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, and Tim Burton collaborated on an Amblin-style adventure with rocket launchers it might look something like Big Game. There's an over-the-top ludicrousness manufactured for maximum silliness by Finnish director Jalmari Helander (Rare Exports), employing a veritable army unit of recognizable American actors with one mini-Rambo of a kid hero. There's nothing to be taken seriously here at all, which is why Big Game turns out to be such big fun.
This is the perfect kind of loud, garish genre flick for somebody like Samuel L. Jackson, who gets plenty of craziness to chew on as William Moore, the floundering President of the United States. Here's a solid tip for any POTUS: It's never a good idea to piss off a Secret Service agent who is willing to take a bullet for you, but that's what he's done and now Morris (Ray Stevenson) has set in motion a revenge plot. Forcing Air Force One to crash land in the deeply forested Finnish mountains, Morris and a big-game-hunting terrorist plan to kill the POTUS and literally mount him on the wall.
What they weren't counting on was 13-year-old Oskari (Onni Tommila), and he's a Spielbergian child protagonist if there ever was one. He comes from a long line of accomplished hunters and seeks to gain his father's respect during a day-long rite of passage all alone in the woods. To return home empty-handed would be an embarrassment to his entire family. So this becomes a story about Oskari's need to prove himself as a man by helping the POTUS survive crashes, getting beat up, gunfire, near-drowning, and more, all with his trusty little bow and arrow. And Helander pulls out every play in the '80s action movie playbook. It's like he's been copying Renny Harlin's homework or something, and that includes the terrible dialogue drowned out by a bevy of explosions. With so many intentional cliches there aren't any surprises to be found here, except for the gaggle of talent Helander was able to assemble. Watching ineffectually from the Pentagon (which looks like a basement) are the Vice President (Victor Garber), the CIA chief (Felicity Huffman), a General (Ted Levine), and a brainy adviser (Jim Broadbent) who knows way too much to be totally innocent.
But is Helander actually trying to say something about all of the action flicks he's referencing? It doesn't seem like it, and too often he's simply going through the motions rather than pushing the story forward. However it's hard to stay mad at any film that allows Jackson to play a wuss in need of rescue by a child. Clearly on a budget, the special effects won't impress anybody but they're kind of endearingly cheap and enjoyable. That's pretty much what we can say about Big Game as a whole, and at barely 90 minutes it knows when to wrap up its prey and go home.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
