Directed by:
Jalmari HelanderScreenplay:
Jalmari HelanderCinematography:
Mika OrasmaaCast:
Samuel L. Jackson, Onni Tommila, Ray Stevenson, Victor Garber, Mehmet Kurtuluş, Ted Levine, Felicity Huffman, Jim Broadbent, Jaymes Butler, Risto Salmi (more)Plots(1)
Oskari, a timid 13-year-old, anxiously awaits his fate. Tradition dictates that like his forefathers before him, the boy's time has come to spend one day and one night alone in the wilderness. Armed with only a bow and arrow, he must return with a prize to prove himself to be a man. Terrified and alone, he wanders through a vast and unforgiving forest when suddenly he hears a deafening rumbling sound. Racing to investigate, Oskari discovers an escape pod. Not just any escape pod - this pod belongs to Air Force One and the battered and bruised man lying before him is the President of the United States! In the skies above, terrorists are hurtling their way to the crash site hell-bent on kidnapping the President. Now the fate of the most powerful man in the world lies in the hands of a 13-year-old-boy. Plunged into a deadly game of cat and mouse with only hours to spare, Oskari and the President must team up to survive the most extraordinary night of their lives. (Altitude Film Distribution)
(more)Reviews (3)
The Finns must have really been enjoying the making of this movie. The absurdity of some of the scenes, but also of the premise as such, reminded me of another movie – Rare Exports, and after I saw this movie, I found out it was made by the same authors. In retrospect, I feel that today I would be able to handle their previous movie because over the time, I got used to the fact that Finnish cinematography can be quite wacky. And this is exactly a case in point. After about 13 minutes, I realized that the Finns turned a 13-year-old kid into an action hero. Fortunately, the action scenes and the shots of beautiful Lapland landscape prove that it was all meant in jest, which I accepted after a while. However, if you can’t accept that, this movie will probably piss you off.
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The filmmakers’ ambitions were apparently limited to trying to combine children’s adventure stories with a mountain-set action thriller in the style of Cliffhanger, without concerning themselves with the idea that it should hold together or fulfil some smart-ass grown-up requirements. Because who would bother with the logic of time, space and the laws of physics when you can just come up with some cool shots. It’s a pity that they didn’t have the resources to go all out with those shots, so the result is kind of half-baked. And that is a terrible shame, because the film has real heart, but it’s buried under a heap of dead weight. I’m not surprised that film nerds are howling, because this is exactly what they hate – a movie with a bombastic promo that twists its potential for sullenly cool arrogance into gleefully childish nonsense.
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This is exactly what I was expecting. A simple B-movie with a very banal plot involving the president, but seeing Samuel L. Jackson as a president who has to survive in the Finnish winter, even if it’s not that freezing, and with only one guy who knows how to hunt by his side, that's something you can only imagine. And yet, here it is!
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