Pig (2021) - It's A Pig, Not A Dog!

 

★★☆☆☆

If you’re misled by the trailer and think ‘Pig’ is a revenge story of ‘You kill my pig. I kill you all’, similar to what’s going on in ‘John Wick’, you’ll be quite upset, and probably check yourself out just a few minutes into the film. While Keanu Reeves is still busy being a super action hero making ‘Matrix 4’ and ‘John Wick 4, 5, 6…’, Nicolas Cage has instead dived into some indie cult films, though he was once, too, considered an action hero after ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ that, in case you forget, granted him the Academy for Best Actor! I don’t have any expectation for ‘Pig’ because I know Cage has deliberately kept away from the mainstream in recent years. That it can’t be just some kind of action entertainment. So it doesn’t let me down but I can’t say I like it either. It manages to keep me seated till the end but it’s not the film for me to feel much!

The film opens by introducing Cage’s Rob living out in the woods with a pig that can help him find truffles to sell for a living. Then we can’t help but wonder: who is this guy Rob? What did he do? What happened to him? How come he decided to shut himself off from the masses and live with a pig? What’s the world like out there in the film? Are we seeing a science fiction here or some real life drama? The answers start to surface bit by bit after Rob’s pig is taken out of the blue one night, and he seems to want to get it back no matter what. You may think, right from this point, it’s going to turn into a John Wick-ish, action-packed, exciting phenomenon, but no, it’s not like what you think it is at all! Yes, there’s a bit of violence and brutality going on but there’s no fancy action, not a bit throughout. Basically the film’s like all talk no action! And it’s not even going to give you the whole picture in the end but only fragments of what’s up with Rob and the world he’s trying to stay away from.

‘Pig’ is not everyone’s cup of tea for sure. If you’re a fan of ‘decent’ Cage, and fond of slow-paced, dialogue-driven melodramas, you may find ‘Pig’ sort of tempting and even charming. But if you expect it to be like ‘John Wick’, you’ll be damned either in a bad way that is, up and leave when the pig’s taken, or in a good way like I am, neither disappointed nor satisfied with what it actually is. I do feel a bit sad and sympathetic when Rob’s getting down to ‘We don’t get a lot of things to really care about’, but that’s all. I don’t get to feel the weight of his loss, or his love for his pig. Has he finally found peace in loss? I doubt, because he seems to be still running even if he has no problem now with playing the tape!