Big Game is basically sold on this logline: President Samuel L. Jackson fights terrorists in the wilderness with a thirteen-year-old Finnish boy armed with a bow. It is an unconventional buddy action movie that doubles as a really strange coming-of-age film in a unique setting. The film is pretty fun as long as it’s sticking with its main characters. It stumbles in trying to add layers to the plot, but overall it is stupid in rather delightful ways.
Oskari (Onni Tommila) is a thirteen-year-old boy from a small village in Northern Finland. He is undergoing a rite of passage where he must head into the wilderness and hunt for big game. His hunt is interrupted by a terrorist attack, which brings Air Force One crashing down on his location. Oskari stumbles on to the President of the United States William Alan Moore (Samuel L. Jackson). Oskari agrees to help out the President, and takes the head of state with him as he tries to complete his trial. But soon enough, the people that shot down the plane are on their trail, and the young hunter and the President must work together to reach safety.
If the film was solely the bow-wielding Oskari and the President as played as Samuel L. Jackson wandering around the wilderness of Northern Finland, it would already be worth it. The film gets a lot out of Oskari generally being unimpressed with the President, and actually manages to build a strong relationship between the two. The film presents a very strange circumstance, but it finds something emotional and relatable is Oskari's quest to become a man in his father's eyes. It just happens that this journey involves taking on a bunch of terrorists.>
It's absurd, but deliciously so. The problem is that the film loses its focus. It keeps cutting away to a room somewhere in America where the vice-president and his advisors try to figure out what happened to the President. The twists revealed in this section of the movie overcomplicate the plot and actually add big holes in the already tenuous logic of the story. And in the end, it leaves a hanging thread that feels terribly unsatisfying. It’s a needless distraction that only serves to pad out the film’s rather flimsy runtime.
But as long as the movie stays in the wilderness, it's pretty fun. The treatment is incongruously epic, the movie shot with a heroic sense of scale and scored with an insistent, soaring soundtrack. The movie regards Oskari as an action hero of Schwarzenegger proportions, even when he can’t quite pull his bowstring all the way back. Onni Tommila is great in this role, displaying a steely reserve that stands up well to his co-star. It’s fun to see Samuel L. Jackson play the wimp for a bit, and it’s terribly satisfying to see the character develop into the Jackson that we’ve grown accustomed to. The weaker moments of the film are made bearable by an overqualified supporting cast, which includes the likes of Jim Broadbent, Victor Garber, Ray Stevenson and Felicity Huffman.
The scenes that aren’t set in Finland really hurt Big Game. The war room sequences, though rather well acted, are comparatively visually uninteresting, and add unneeded wrinkles to what should have been a straightforward if already ridiculous plot. Still, it doesn’t erase the fun of having Samuel L. Jackson traipsing around wilderness with a bow-wielding thirteen-year-old boy who’s out to prove that he’s a man. If just the idea of that doesn’t immediately grab you, then you might be incapable of recognizing joy.
My Rating:
