The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot (2018)

Elderly World War II veteran Calvin Barr (Sam Elliott) lives a sad, lonely life with his dog, clearly having taken some sort of wrong turn earlier in his life he now can’t correct anymore. In flashbacks (where Calvin is portrayed by Aidan Turner who looks nothing whatsoever like young Sam Elliott, but what the hey) we learn that he was some sort of secret mythic American hero, indeed killing Hitler and most probably getting up to other things of the sort too. But at least to his mind, his deeds never actually changed anything for the better and cost him the love of his life (Caitlin FitzGerald). His isolation even makes it difficult to connect to his younger brother Ed (Larry Miller) - although there is clearly love between the two men.

Now, he is visited by two gentlemen of the Canadian and US governments. They need his help in hunting down and killing the Bigfoot, who is carrying a virus so deadly, it is threatening the world. A virus Calvin just happens to be immune against.

While Robert D. Krzykowski’s film does indeed have an awesome title, I’m not too sure it does itself much of a service with it, for the title – as well as some of the marketing material - surely suggests the film to be either a campy comedy or a two-fisted pulp tale, not exactly roping in the ideal audience for what turns out to be a film about the travails of age and loneliness. It’s not that the title is lying to the audience, mind you, this is indeed a film about the man who killed Hitler and the Bigfoot (and also not one of these “it only happened in his mind” numbers I loathe with a passion); there are even some jokes in it, too. It’s just that his killing of Hitler and the Bigfoot are not really what’s important to the film; in fact, them not being important for Calvin’s life, and being detrimental to his happiness is part of the point of the film. Or rather, part of its point is to show that these heroic achievements aren’t really what would keep one from ending up sad, alone and full of regret. To Calvin, they don’t even feel like achievements anymore, if they ever truly did.

And that’s where the film rightly puts its emphasis, slowly revealing how exactly it happened Calvin didn’t marry the love of his life, how little moments that at the time seemed to just postpone important things to some later date were actually last chances, and how Calvin’s mixed inabilities to make the important steps in his life, to really face the consequences of not making them, and to then be unable to connect to the actual world around him, left him at the bad place we find him now in the last part of his life.

Elliott’s great at this, to no one’s surprise I would hope, not just simply archetypically embodying a type of American maleness for the film to criticize as well as to admire, and absolutely being a guy you’d believe to have killed Hitler and tussle with the Bigfoot, but putting a lot of nuance into the less larger than life parts of Calvin, portraying his loneliness, his orneriness and his difficulty to connect without any melodramatic outbursts but with small gestures, glances and shifts of posture, as something natural and organic to the character.


Despite the elegiac tone of the film, it’s not a hopeless affair either, Calvin eventually taking small steps to show his connection to the world around him. They are only small steps, but then that’s how life goes.