Currently at the tail-end of its eight-week shoot on location in Bavaria and at Bavaria Film Studios, here’s your first look at Samuel L. Jackson as President of the USA and co-star Onni Tommila, in a thriller titled Big Game, Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s English-language debut. 

The film’s producers have released the first image from the film (above), which follows a shy, nervous 13-year-old boy named Oskari (Tommila), who must prove his manhood by spending a night alone in the forest, when Air Force One is shot down by terrorists and Oskari discovers the President (Samuel L. Jackson) in an escape pod. With the terrorists closing in, Oskari and the President team up to survive the night.

I’m actually intrigued by this project; director Helander’s last feature, the X-mas horror story, Rare Exports, is a well-made, imaginative, very entertaining twist on the traditional Christmas tale, and I’d recommend it if you haven’t seen it. So Samuel L. Jackson should be in good hands here.

The project is described as an “adrenaline-fuelled action adventure that takes the universal rite-of-passage theme of iconic 80s films, such as ‘E.T.’ and ‘The Karate Kid,’ and brilliantly combines this with the visceral thrill of high-concept action classics such as ‘Die Hard’ and ‘Taken.’”

Jim Broadbent, Ray Stevenson, Felicity Huffman, Victor Garber, Ted Levine and Mehmet Kurtulus, round out the cast.

The film is a Finnish-German-UK co-production.

Jackson, who seems to be making his presence felt internationally, recently wrapped production in South Africa, on the live-action adaptation of a Japanese anime film called Kite (Yasuomi Umetsu’s 1998 work).

In Big Game, he’ll join a short line of black actors who’ve played the president of the USA on screen, including Morgan Freeman, Dennis Haysbert, Danny Glover and Jamie Foxx to name just 4.