There are moments in Big Game that hinted at the fun tongue-in-cheek actioner it could and should have been but for some reason writer-director Jelmari Helander (he of the brilliant Rare Exports) doesn’t give it the full gun and his film becomes a reheated kids Boy’s Own adventure that you’ve seen a thousand times since the eighties. You know the one: Loner Kid Comes Good By Saving President And Vanquishing Foreign Bad Guys. Shame.
Tommila is a Finnish boy desperate to impress his manly father on this year’s rite-of-passage hunting trip – the kind of Spartan rite-of-passage where young children are let loose into the wilderness for the night in the hope that they kill an animal. Unbeknownst to Tommila, three men of ‘Middle Eastern persuasion’ have hijacked a tour helicopter and have flown out into the same dense woods, setting up camp with a surface-to-air rocket launcher. A few miles above their position Air Force One, carrying President Samuel L. Jackson and bodyguard Ray Stevenson, miffed that he took a bullet for the boss and is now being forced into retirement, makes its descent into Helsinki. When the rockets hit, Stevenson bundles Jackson into an escape pod and ejected, falling near where Tommila is unsuccessfully hunting his prey, and the bad guys go about tracking the downed president. Back in the pentagon Felicity Huffman and Jim Broadbent do what they can.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this is going to end and Helander resists any temptation to take any steps to disguise the outcome. It’s a lean, empty adventure that wants to get where it’s going as quickly as possible with as little detours as possible. Tommila’s journey, what he learns from all this, remains a mystery - he might show his dad that he is a man but hunting living things for sport remains unexplored.
Why oh why didn’t Helander go for the cheesiness? Worse still he flirts with if from time to time just to tease. There’s a wonderfully ludicrous Air Force One evacuation sequence, the deliciously bad lines - "I spoke to my taxidermist about the logistics of the human cadaver…", and "Instead of LOOKING tough, we have to BE tough!" - and Jim Broadbent is cast as one of the best CIA operatives they’ve ever had. Jim Broadbent! Come on.
This could have been a hoot but Helander doesn’t have nearly enough fun with it.
