FILM REVIEW Big Game

UNLIKELY PAIRING?Samuel L Jackson and Onni Tommila star in ‘Big Game’.

A plane disaster


Cinema
Ciara Galvin

NOT so long ago on this page I asked the question, ‘Why do bad films happen to good actors?’. I used the example of Samuel L Jackson in the famously bad ‘Snakes on a Plane’. Well, guess what, he’s back on a plane, minus the snakes. Yes, Jackson has decided to take another risk and take up a role as the president of the United States, of all people, in ‘Big Game’.
I had reservations about this film, and those reservations were warranted.
The Jalmari Helander film sees Air Force One being shot down by terrorists – standard Hollywood film fodder, but what isn’t standard is where the film goes then. The president finds himself in a forest in Finland. Yes, you heard me, Finland.
You see, the plane is fitted out with a security pod, and the president, being the plane’s most precious passenger, is in it. Thus he escapes the air attack unscathed.
But those pesky terrorists don’t stop there, and the president must not only escape their wrath, he must also survive the harsh environment of a Finnish forest. And what does every person need when fighting for survival in a remote forest in northern Europe? Well, Bear Grylls I suppose, but that’s more for a documentary on the Discovery channel. In this film, the president’s survival is entrusted with a 13-year-old Finnish boy played by Onni Tommila. Odd, yes, but one can only assume Helander wanted to digress from ‘the norm’.
The young teenager camping out alone in the wilderness is inept when it comes to survival skills at first, and he finds himself out there because of parental expectations: They want him to show his masculinity by hunting his first animal.
The oddness doesn’t stop there. Back in Washington, the events are being monitored by all the big wigs. Unfortunately, it looks more like a parody of what you’d imagine a crisis room to look like. I’ll put it this way, it’s hard to take Jim Broadbent seriously in his CIA role after seeing him in films like Moulin Rouge and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Tommila’s character comes into his own as the film progresses, changing from a child to a hunter and gaining those all-important survival skills. He steals the show from Jackson not just because he is a kid (kids always steal the show, by proxy of age) but also because he seems to fit and his character develops. His transformation from a boy who doesn’t know how to use a bow and arrow to one that says ‘Don’t worry Mr President, I got this’ is the best thing about this 12A-rated film.
The film turns into more of a coming-of-age tale than a film about the president of the United States and his escape from terrorists. At times it flirts with being a fun kids’ film and probably would have been better off going down that road.
Big Game is a weird hybrid of Air Force One meets Snakes on a Plane meets White House Down. What’s more unbelievable than the entire storyline is that this film got the nod and budget to go into production in the first place. Samuel L Jackson needs to find a new mode of transport.

Rating 4 out of 10