To the eyes of international audiences, Nordic countries are stereotypically relied upon to produce gruelling, depressing thrillers, movies in the vein of Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and TV shows in the vein of Denmark’s The Killing. One country that seems exempt from the current cultural fascination with “Nordic Noir” is Finlan.
Whereas other (mostly Scandinavian) countries in Northern Europe are importing their grim and gripping thrillers worldwide, Finnish cinema seems to be playing to a different trend entirely from their neighbouring cousins. Their two most notable imports of recent years were Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a John Carpenter inflected horror about the dark history behind Santa Claus, as well as Iron Sky, the film made famous for depicting the Nazis colonising the moon following Hitler’s death.
Tongue-in-cheek or just plain awful?
If the output of Sweden, Denmark and Norway was drawing international critical acclaim, then the cinematic output of Finland recently has drawn (for the most part) international bemusement. Yet here lay the bold origins of a new sub-genre, one diametrically opposed to the icy cool of Scandi-Noir. With its embracing of the trashiest aspects of imported US pop-culture from the 80’s and 90’s, steeped in a European mythology, Finnish filmmakers are attempting to reappropriate distinctively American culture as a cornerstone of their national cinematic history. This sub-genre doesn’t have a name yet, but let’s hope it doesn’t develop one.
On the evidence of Big Game, the new feature from Rare Exports director Jalmari Helander, the novelty value of this sub-genre is likely to wear out pretty quickly, if only because future features are unlikely to be able to produce movies this laughable without ironically winking at the audience to let you know the cast and crew understand the film is a bit rubbish too. Big Game succeeds because it never apologises for its own preposterousness, playing it straight-faced throughout despite being entirely ridiculous. If it were played with even a single wink to the camera, the entire movie would fall off the rails. It’s that thing everybody craves yet is so rarely delivered- a good bad movie.
The film opens in the harsh mountain lands of Finland, with a young boy called Oskari (Onni Tommila) on the cusp of his thirteenth birthday. To celebrate “becoming a man”, his father and his hunting friends want him to prove his worth as a hunter by leaving him alone in the woods for a night, with just a bow and arrow for company. If he dies, then so be it – the woods give you what you deserve.
In the skies above, president Alan Moore (Samuel L. Jackson) is thrown from Air Force One when it’s hijacked by terrorists. Oskari rescues the president from his escape pod and vows to keep him safe during his duration in the forest; he only planned on killing a deer, now he’s helping POTUS avoid getting killed and turned into a stuffed animal (yes, really) by an incredibly hap-hazard terrorist organisation.
The spectre of 9/11 that looms largely over 21st century American society has slowly been seeping its way into mainstream pop culture recently, with blockbusters like The Avengers and Man of Steel (to name just two) creating similar city destroying events that characterised their final acts. It seems laughable now the riots that erupted at a New York cinema in 2006 when a cinema decided to play a trailer for United 93, as international cinema goers are increasingly desensitised to images not too dissimilar to some of the most shocking in recent history.
Yet in a film as unapologetically trashy as Big Game, it still leaves a sour taste in the mouth hearing some stock-exposition characters talking about the president’s fate as he is thrown off the plane as “the worst terrorist attack since 9/11”. Despite being written and directed by a Finnish man, with all funding coming directly from European nations, the movie is bizarrely pro-American in a way that I’m not entirely sure is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, with its love for the military coming across like a sincerest riff on both Hot Shots movies.
It’s a love letter to movies from the past, complete with all their flaws
Jalmari Helander is notably influenced by trashy 80’s pop culture, yet for all the riffs on legitimately great 80’s movies (E.T and The Karate Kid are invoked repeatedly), the movie’s military preoccupation at times invokes Red Dawn, which isn’t exactly a flattering comparison. The straight-faced tone of the movie ensures we don’t know whether he’s parodying war-propagandist movies from cinema’s recent past, or just merely poking fun at America’s military obsession – doing either ultimately flaws the film, with the latter in particular coming off as weirdly mean-spirited (and I’m saying this as a pacifist). This is a movie that will play a lot differently to audiences unaware of the film’s Nordic origins.
The movie is at its best when it’s at its worst, embracing the cloth-eared dialogue without letting on whether or not it knows it’s rubbish: based on the quality of Helander’s previous film, the aforementioned Rare Exports, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest he has his tongue firmly in his cheek. The dialogue is cataclysmically awful, often so unfunny, yet there are many paradoxically laugh-out-loud hilarious one-liners (personal highlight was a conversation between two terrorists analysing a footprint; “small shoes, what does that mean?” “Small feet, usually”).
In one of its later action sequences, the movie has the sheer nerve to unironically remake the infamous “nuking the fridge” scene from the universally derided (although I would argue unfairly) fourth Indiana Jones movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in a way that signals that this movie doesn’t care about how its audience will perceive it. This was the only suggestion that the movie wasn’t tongue in cheek – after all, having a sequence similar to one of the most derided movies in recent pop-culture history is a clear mission statement that you have no interest in making anything remotely “cool”.
Verdict
The movie never lets on whether it’s being intentionally funny, or is hilarious merely by accident. This apparent sincerity is both the movie’s strength and weakness; it has helped create a good bad movie, something even the greatest directors working today struggle with (Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof was a failure due to its constant winking at the audience, letting us know it was a bad movie every step of the way). However, a bad movie is still a bad movie, no matter how enjoyable; Big Game is merely the best a bad movie can be.
Have you seen Big Game? And can you answer the immortal question- so bad it’s good, or just plain bad?
Big Game is out now in the UK and released on June 26th (My Birthday!) in the US. All International release dates can be found here.
(top image source: Entertainment One)
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