One of the most pleasant surprises in last year’s Midnight Madness TIFF program was the Finnish action flick Big Game. It stars Samuel L. Jackson as the president of the United States, which is in and of itself pretty awesome, but the movie got even better from there. Jackson is the target of an assassination attempt that leaves Air Force One as a pile of smoldering rubble and Jackson, abandoned in the mountains, at the mercy of psychotic big game hunters.
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.
