Film Divider:
Jalmari Helander‘s Big Game was first announced in 2013 with some concept art of a young boy wielding a bow and the announcement that Samuel L. Jackson would be playing the President of the United States.
To this day, those seem like the two most appealing, exploitable elements of the package, and this new trailer works both angles well.
Jackson delivers exactly what you’d think he would, and there’s some promise of a family film that packs action more accurately attuned to what young viewers want: more rough and tumble and an edge of danger than some slapstick skateboard chase with a puppy in a backwards baseball cap and a comedy mall cop.
SAm Love writes- Who doesn’t love an over-the-top action flick? Back in the 1980s and 90s, you couldn’t get away from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal and all that crowd. It seems like the majority of films from the period just consisted of those guys running around, twatting bad guys. And audiences loved it. But nowadays, save for cheaply made straight-to-DVD releases, it’s something of a dead genre.
TRR: In 2006's Snakes on a Plane, Samuel L. Jackson starred as an FBI agent battling slithering reptiles aboard a commercial jet. But in writer/director Jalmari Helander's Big Game, he plays the Commander-in-Chief, who's ejected in an escape pod from his own private jet, Air Force One, mere moments before it gets blown out of the sky. The movie has the American President teaming up with a 13-year-old would-be hunter named Oskari (Onni Tommila) to take on a group of terrorists in the Finnish wilderness. And the result isn't just a throwback to '90s-era action blockbusters; it's also a coming-of-age tale. With an over-the-top villain and a game supporting cast full of recognizable faces, it's hard to come away disappointed. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of this Blu-ray release, which is more or less bare bones. Still, Big Game is fun enough, and worthy of a rental at least.
If nothing else, Big Game sure is a strange little movie. On one hand, it’s a throwback to the big dopey high-concept action movies on the 90s. On the other hand, it’s also a small and quirky little foreign film that just happens to be populated by big Hollywood actors that features a premise that would have made Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson leap up from their piles of cocaine in the late 80s to spend all of their money on making the dream a reality.
I'm already interested in seeing this movie from the trailer alone.
I liked the way they recast the kid from Rare Exports in this movie.