Samuel L. Jackson will play the President of the USA in a thriller titled Big Game, which is Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s English-language debut.

His last feature, the X-mas horror story, Rare Exports, is a well-made, 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.

Altitude Film Sales will shop the film at Cannes this week.

Big Game follows a shy, nervous 13-year-old boy named Oskari, 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.

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.’”

Production is set for this summer in Finland and Germany.

Jackson, who seems to be making his presence felt internationally, just 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 and Danny Glover to name 3.