At The Movies: Crime drama The Pig, The Snake And The Pigeon offers violent thrills and dark humour
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Ethan Juan plays an assassin-turned-vigilante in the Taiwanese crime thriller The Pig, The Snake And The Pigeon.
PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION
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The Pig, The Snake And The Pigeon (M18)
134 minutes, opens on Thursday
4 stars
The story: The police and Taiwanese mobsters are hot on the trail of Gui-lin (Ethan Juan), an assassin of unparalleled skill. After he receives a cancer diagnosis that leaves him with weeks to live, he gains a new obsession: ridding the nation of its worst criminals. But, on his first mission, things become complicated after he meets Hsiao-mei (Gingle Wang), a woman with ties to a dangerous mobster.
The story is a mess, there is a sudden change in tone midway and secondary characters exist purely to make the hero look cool.
But what this crime thriller – which is nominated for seven awards at the upcoming Golden Horse Awards 2023 – lacks in coherence, it makes up for in well-constructed black comedy and violent thrills.
Hong Kong writer-director Wong Ching-po specialises in crowd-pleasing action and martial arts pictures (Once Upon A Time In Shanghai, 2014; and Revenge: A Love Story, 2010).
His take on the heavily used premise of an assassin gone rogue is distinguished from others by its mix of cynicism and heavy romanticism – a trait that permeates Hong Kong action movies.
Gui-lin, for example, embarks on a killing spree because, through divination, the gods have told him to give up his evil ways – except that his attempt at redemption involves pumping bullets into yet more people.
The deaths are morally justified, the story alleges, because the victims are several degrees more depraved than the assassin.
Salon owner Hsiao-mei, as they say, could have come only from the mind of a male writer. She is beautiful, tragic and yielding, and her abused, semi-nude body serves to add spice to the proceedings.
She is, of course, in need of a rescue.
The pulpiness of the writing could have been saved by more stylised or fantasy-oriented visuals, but Wong does not provide those.
Midway, the story swerves from urban grit into horror styled like the modern Midsommar (2019), when the hero’s journey lands him in a community of guitar-strumming vegans.
In an absurdly violent climax, Wong makes clear what he thinks about those who say they have the answer to life’s problems. Its nihilism is shocking, but also surprisingly funny.
Hot take: Hong Kong-style cinema violence comes to Taiwan in the pulpy but exciting flick about a killer seeking to atone for his sins by becoming a scourge to the island’s worst criminals.
