Samuel L. Jackson As President William Alan Moore (Big Game, 2014)
Admittedly, Big Game isn’t exactly a great piece of cinema. It falls more into the ‘so bad, it’s almost good’ category. On the Samuel L. Jackson scale of movie-making, it lands squarely at the Snakes On A Plane end, rather than the Pulp Fiction part of the spectrum. But, within it, we have Samuel L. Jackson as the President of the United States, and it leaves us with the question – why isn’t he always the President of the United States? When the country is under attack from terrorists, isn’t it Samuel L Jackson you want calling the shots? Of course it is.
But, in Big Game, there is a significant period of time when his President Moore is technically unable to call the shots – because his plane is shot down in a remote, mountainous area, and he is jettisoned from it in an escape pod. While he awaits military rescue, he is released from his pod by a young boy named Oskari (Onni Tommila) – who has been sent into the forest by his local community for a rite of passage. He is expected to survive in the wilderness for a number of days, and return home having killed an animal.
With terrorists and traitorous Secret Service agents on their tail, the desperate duo of President Moore and Oskari fight their way out of the situation – staging daring escapes and excellent strategy. If ever there were a case to be made for Presidential campaigns to be conducted in the style of The Hunger Games, this movie is it.
