Big Game

There is a very specific, almost hallucinogenic joy in watching Samuel L. Jackson—a man who has faced down Jedi, Avengers, and snakes on a plane—looking genuinely terrified of a Finnish forest. I watched Big Game on a Tuesday night while trying to peel a very stubborn orange that eventually sprayed juice directly into my left eye. That stinging sensation actually matched the intensity of the opening plane crash quite well, though it did make the rest of the film a bit blurry for the first ten minutes.

Released in 2014, Big Game feels like a transmission from a different timeline. It arrived at the tail end of our "Modern Cinema" era, just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe was hardening into a rigid formula and every action movie felt like it needed a $200 million price tag to exist. Here comes director Jalmari Helander, fresh off his cult success with the twisted Christmas flick Rare Exports (2010), delivering a $8.5 million love letter to the high-concept silliness of the 1990s. It’s a movie that knows exactly what it is: a "boy’s own adventure" where the stakes are global but the heart is purely adolescent.

A 90s Blockbuster in a Digital Body

The plot is gloriously lean, bordering on the prehistoric. Samuel L. Jackson is William Alan Moore, a President of the United States who feels more like a tired middle manager than a leader of the free world. When Air Force One is sabotaged by a traitorous Secret Service agent (the late, great Ray Stevenson in full villain mode), the President is ejected in an escape pod into the rugged wilderness of Finland. Enter Onni Tommila as Oskari, a 13-year-old boy on a traditional quest to prove his manhood by hunting a deer. Instead of a buck, he finds the most powerful man on Earth.

What I find fascinating looking back is how much the film leans into the aesthetics of the mid-90s. If you squint, you can see the DNA of Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One (1997) or Renny Harlin's Cliffhanger (1993). It has that "Die Hard in a [Location]" energy that defined an entire generation of rentals. However, because it was made in 2014, it grapples with that era’s peculiar digital transitions. While the landscapes are sweeping and majestic, some of the CGI explosions look like they were rendered on a microwave during a power outage, yet that somehow adds to the charm. It’s a film that prioritizes the idea of spectacle over the photorealism we’ve become bored by in the 2020s.

The Jackson Subversion

We’ve grown so accustomed to Samuel L. Jackson being the "coolest guy in the room" that seeing him play a vulnerable, slightly inept President is a stroke of genius. He isn't Harrison Ford punching terrorists; he's a guy who can't even open his own escape pod. This leaves the heavy lifting to Onni Tommila, who is spectacular. There’s a sincerity in their chemistry that prevents the movie from devolving into a total parody. The movie is basically 'Home Alone' if Kevin McCallister had the Leader of the Free World in his treehouse.

The supporting cast back in the "War Room" is a Who’s Who of "Hey, it’s that guy!" actors. You’ve got Victor Garber (Titanic), Ted Levine (The Silence of the Lambs), and Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge!). They spend most of the movie staring at screens and looking Grave™ with various degrees of intensity. It’s a classic trope of the era—the bickering bureaucrats—and it provides a nice rhythmic counterpoint to the mountain-sliding madness happening in the wild.

Practical Heart vs. Digital Limits

One thing I truly appreciate about Jalmari Helander's direction is the sense of scale. Even though the budget was modest for an action film, it feels huge. They actually shot most of the exteriors in the Bavarian Alps rather than Finland (turns out the Finnish mountains aren't quite "cinematic" enough for a Hollywood-style thriller), and that physical reality grounds the silliness. When Oskari and the President are hurtling down a mountainside in a freezer box—yes, a freezer box—there's a weight to it that you just don't get in fully digital environments.

The film disappeared from theaters almost instantly, failing to even make its budget back. I think it fell through a cultural crack. It was too violent and "grown-up" for the kids who would love the adventure, and perhaps too earnest and "kiddie" for the cynical action fans of 2014. But in the landscape of today’s algorithmic filmmaking, Big Game stands out as a weird, jagged little gem. It’s a reminder of a time when you could still pitch a movie based on a single, ridiculous sentence and someone would actually give you the money to make it.

Ultimately, Big Game is exactly the kind of movie I love to stumble upon at 11 PM on a streaming service I forgot I subscribed to. It’s a breezy 90 minutes that respects your time and understands the fundamental rule of action cinema: if you have Samuel L. Jackson in your movie, you eventually have to give him a moment to be a badass, even if he has to learn it from a thirteen-year-old with a bow. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun, and sometimes that’s all I’m looking for between the citrus-stinging realities of life.