'Big Game' is what happens when you feed all of your action movie templates into a super computer. It is exactly what you'd expect it to be; no better and no worse. It's ninety minutes of fluff that manages to entertain without quite delivering the laughs or thrills to a high enough standard but it is still better than anything in the last two 'Die Hard' movies. Samuel L. Jackson gets to say "mutha" in the final reel, things explode, terrorists get their asses kicked, order is restored. Job done.
It's a narrative of comfort for your thirteen year old Californian mindset audience. A young boy can prove himself a man by saving the president, the 'leader of the free world' gets the job done right by shooting backstabbers/doubters/Middle Eastern types himself and there are no pesky women to get in the way.
If you've seen the trailer, you've pretty much seen the film. As my multiplex cinema seems to have been running the trailer for the past year this was a bit of a problem. It lacks surprise. It feels a bit like a microwaved ready-meal and there is no disguising the fact that we've been here many times before. It's a disappointment that the film doesn't make more of its unique setting - a remote Finnish location. I'd have like to have seen our young hero using more bushcraft skills to save the day. It could have played like a more savage 'Home Alone', with Oskari setting deadly traps and utilising makeshift weapons and brutal survival skills. What we have is all pretty tame. The bad guys needed to be more threatening and have some convincing motivation. The terrorist leader is a psychopath and the President is his "big game prize". That's about as much depth as you get but it's fine for what it is: a B-movie digital watch compared to Die Hard's Rolex. It's not as flashy but it still tells the time okay.
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