Offbeat premise makes for wildly entertaining 'Big Game'

<h3 class="briefHead">Mini-review: 'Big Game'</h3>

The outrageous plot in Jalmari Helander's ridiculous Finnish action adventure "Big Game" sounds like the twisted fantasy of a radical President Obama hater.

An unnamed oil sheikh's "overprivileged" psychopathic illegitimate son, Hazar (Mehmet Kurtulus), intends to hunt down the black president of the United States in the Finnish forest, kill him and have taxidermists stuff him as an ultimate hunter's trophy.

The president here, Bill Moore, is played by Samuel L. Jackson with a mustache and perpetual scowl. (Bill Moore? Is he a Democrat?)

A lame duck chief executive, Moore is diving in the polls when one of his Secret Service protectors, Agent Morris (Ray Stevenson), takes a dive of his own by arranging the downing of Air Force One over a forest in Northern Finland.

Meanwhile, a 13-year-old Finnish lad named Oskari (a surprisingly commanding actor named Onni Tommila), son of a local hunter, has been dispatched into the woods alone to complete his ceremonial rite of passage by killing his first wild animal. The poor kid can barely hold a bow, let alone fire an arrow.

The scene where a bewildered Oskari discovers the president's crashed escape pod and imagines it to be an extraterrestrial visit isn't nearly as humorous as it should be.

Therein lies the problem with "Big Game." Is it supposed to be an over-the-top sendup of kid-oriented action movies? Or is it just a bad movie swaddled in broad powerful images, complemented by a pulse-poundingly epic score from Juri Seppa and Miska Seppa?

Once Moore convinces Oskari he's not an alien, the two become fast forest buddies.

"I'm not a hunter!" Oskari cries. "I'm a nobody!"

So Moore takes the lad under his chief executive wing, admits to feeling insecure as president, and builds the boy's self-confidence up enough for him to rally in the movie's second half when psychopathic Hzar and his men scour the countryside for their prize.

As Hazar tries hard to emulate Alan Rickman's Eurotrash crime boss in "Die Hard," Oskari gets to boss the inexperienced POTUS with pretentious lines such as "My forest, my rules!"

Back in a Washington, D.C. situation room, the vice president (Victor Garber), CIA director (Felicity Huffman) and a general in charge of furrowed brows (Ted Levine) go through what could almost be a "Saturday Night Live" comedy skit, while Jim Broadbent chows down on a Dagwood sandwich as he instantly deduces the plane crash had to be an inside job.

This is a fascinating plane wreck of a movie from Helander, who in 2010 gave us the revisionist St. Nick horror film "Rare Exports," Helander has a twisted sense of humor for sure, but a poor sense of how to to use slow-motion. He employs it so badly so often that by the time Oskari finally pulls that bowstring back, the gimmick has already numbed our senses.

"Big Game" opens at the South Barrington 30. Rated PG-13 for language, violence. ★ ★