Big Game Mini-Review
Tonally chaotic and formulaic to the extreme, Big Game is nonetheless a wildly entertaining action-comedy-ish from Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander. The star of Helander bizarre debut Rare Exports, Onni Tommila, plays 13-year-old Oskari, who must journey into the Finnish wilderness and kill a deer within a day to become a man. Instead, he discovers Samuel L Jackson as the President, forced to evacuate Air Force One following an attack by terrorist mercenaries and his bodyguard (a sleepwalking Ray Stevenson). The film's sly genius is in featuring two of the most incompetent, ill-equipped and frankly useless heroes in action movie history. Oskari is incapable of shooting an arrow further than five feet, whereas the President can barely makes his way around a firearm. These unlikely comrades, assisted by Jim Broadbent's sandwich-chewing former agent Herbert, bond over their mutual ineffectuality in a slow build-up before all hell breaks loose in an enthralling final act. The tone wavers between kid-friendly adventure fare and brutal action movie, with middling results. Taken in earnest, this would be a complete disaster. However, if you can buy into the tongue-in-cheek attitude, the well-handled action and endearing performances should provide enough thrills to compensate for the cookie-cutter villains and overt masculinity. If nothing else, it surely delivers the year's greatest death scene. Trust me, you'll know it when you see it...
Five-Word Verdict: Rubbish, in a good way.
Score: 3/5
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