Big Game (2014)

Big Game arrives from Finland in 2014, the most expensive production that country had mounted to that point, and it spends the money on a premise of magnificent silliness. Air Force One is shot down over Lapland, and the President of the United States must survive the wilderness alongside a thirteen-year-old boy on his first hunt. The director, Jalmari Helander, has cited the adventure pictures of the eighties and nineties as his inheritance, and the film wears that lineage openly. Terrorists chase. Helicopters explode. A refrigeration unit becomes a prison. The tone is brisk and unserious, which is its own kind of honesty.

Samuel L. Jackson plays the President, a casting decision that in a different film might have carried a thesis. Here it carries a man in a suit who complains about the cold. The film never remarks on his race, never builds a theme around it, never asks the audience to reflect on the distance between the Oval Office and the actor occupying it. It casts him and moves on. Felicity Huffman sits in as the Vice President, likewise unremarked. This is representation by arithmetic, not by argument, and it constitutes the film's only glancing contact with the social consciousness of its decade.

The moral machinery is genre-standard. A boy proves himself against his father's reputation. A corrupt Secret Service agent orchestrates the attack. A Vice President schemes toward the presidency and is quietly disposed of in a Pentagon bathroom. None of it is arranged to lecture. There are no speeches about the war on terror, no late pivot into institutional critique, no moment when the camera lingers on a lesson it expects us to absorb. The film wants to be Goonies with guns, and it succeeds at approximately that. Measured against the cultural currents that would soon dominate its industry, it reads as a relic of an older appetite: an action picture that never once turns to the audience and clears its throat.