In Big Game , an action film that recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Jackson’s U.S. president cannot throw a punch. But that is not an (intentional) dig at Obama.
Samuel L. Jackson in Big Game.
Stephanie Kulbach / Altitude
TORONTO — In Big Game, a new action movie that premiered Friday night at the Toronto International Film Festival, Samuel L. Jackson plays the president of the United States, who is marooned in the Finnish wilderness after Air Force One is destroyed by terrorists. His only hope of survival is a 13-year-old boy named Oskari (Onni Tommila), who entered the same vast mountainous forest with camping supplies, a knife, and a bow and quiver of arrows, tasked by his father (and his whole village) with killing something massive before he comes home the following morning.
Together, they have to thwart the terrorists, especially since the president is, essentially, useless once he lands in the wild. He can't throw a punch, he doesn't know how to fire a gun, and he can't even persuade Oskari to take him immediately back to civilization — the boy decides instead to continue his quest, and the president is forced to go along for the ride.
Big Game was co-written and directed by Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander, best known for his 2010 Santa-Claus-is-an-evil-monster cult movie Rare Exports, and his latest effort has just about the same go-for-broke moviemaking spirit as that fan favorite.
But Helander was clear that he was not attempting to make some kind of pointed political statement about Barack Obama by depicting an African-American president as, essentially, a wimp. He told BuzzFeed News at the festival that he didn't even really care if the president was white or black. "I just wanted him to be as old as possible and vulnerable and stuff like that." Jackson signed onto the film, Helander explained, simply after sparking to his script.
"I don't know anything about U.S. presidents, and I don't care," the filmmaker said with a laugh. "It's just the president of the United States. Just the idea of him."
Onni Tommila and Samuel L. Jackson in Big Game.
Stephanie Kulbach / Altitude
That idea was a basic action movie what-if: "I have the most powerful man on the planet and, when you put him in the forest, he actually can't survive there," said Helander. "Oskari meets somebody who's even worse [at] being in the forest than him. That's the whole idea."
But it was more than that to others. Helander had barely been at the festival for 24 hours, and he already sounded weary of talking about the — to him, nonexistent — politics of his movie. Big Game came to Toronto without North American distribution, and ironically, the film's accidental association with Obama could help boost interest. For an American audience, it's hard to shake the timely similarities between current criticisms of Obama as an overly cautious intellectual and characters in the movie who criticize Jackson's president for having no backbone in the White House, and no skills to fend for himself in the wilderness.
No comments:
Post a Comment