I love this movie.

I love it because it’s fun.

I love it because it has heart.

I love it because it’s not afraid to take itself seriously.

Not that this is a “serious” film. The plot is simple and easy to follow. There are no heavy thematic elements. It is neither dark nor gritty. Big Game is popcorn action film-making at its best.

But a popcorn action film is no easier to make than an indie drama. Both require a commitment to craft, a focus on story and characters. And while the type of story a popcorn movie tells might be quite different, it requires no less finesse to make it great.

That is what I mean when I say this movie takes itself seriously. Director Jalmari Helander isn’t just going through the motions. There’s no cynicism on display here. He’s making a movie about a twelve-year-old Finnish kid who has to save the president of the United States from terrorists, and he’s making it good.

Oskari, the aforementioned Finnish twelve-year-old, is hunting big game (do you see that, do you see what I did there?). His father is a great hunter with a reputation Oskari will never live up to. He’s not strong enough, not tough enough to be the man his father wants him to become. But he goes out into the woods anyway, with a bow he can barely draw, to bring back the proof of his worth as a hunter and as a man.

And into his forest falls a man with a range of problems all his own. The President. Of the United States.

President William Alan Moore is strikingly different from Oskari. William has power, he’s the President after all. He doesn’t have to prove his manhood to anyone. But he’s also weak. He’s losing his political battles, and he’s addicted to doughnuts. He can’t do a sit-up to save his life. And he’s just been ejected from a plane into a wilderness where there are men out to kill him.

The team-up between these two is nothing short of wonderful. They bounce off of each other in interesting and organic ways, both of them eventually drawing strength from the other. This is the heart of the movie, the boy and the President, sitting at a camp fire, roasting hot dogs and sharing their fears. All of the explosions and action sequences to follow are just ketchup on the hot dog.

The villains on offer aren’t so nuanced, but even if they veer closer to caricature than character, they still carry a fair amount of narrative heft. Here too we have an unlikely team, this time comprised of an idealistic and driven secret service agent and a delightfully psychopathic hunter/terrorist. (Yes, this is the kind of movie that has a hunter/terrorist in it.) These bad guys are just over the top enough to be fun and still remain threatening, a tricky line to walk.

Big Game is a joy to watch. The camera sweeps and swoops and holds at just the right moments, the music swells with the action, bombastic, exciting, and ultimately triumphant. The action is over the top, (though in an age of superhero blockbusters it might seem tame by comparison). And it is always rooted in the human side of the story. At first glance this is a film about a kid saving the president from terrorists. But look again. It’s really a story about a boy standing in the shadow of his father, striving to become a man who casts a shadow of his own.