Animal Crackers
Wong Ching-po returns to the movies with the wackiest spin on the gangster thriller you’ll see this year.
The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon
Director: Wong Ching-po • Writer: Wong Ching-po
Starring: Ethan Juan, Chen Yi-wen, Ben Yuen, Gingle Wang, Hsieh Chiung-hsuan, Lee Lee-zen, Troy Liu, Peggy Tseng
Taiwan • 2hrs 13mins
Opens Hong Kong November 2 • IIB
Grade: B
Here we go again. Another stylish gangster thriller that’s a little challenging to follow. But all things being equal, one-time Hong Kong director Wong Ching-po’s first film in the better part of a decade, The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon | 周處除三害, is infinitely more entertaining than the hot mess that is Zhang Yimou’s latest. I want to pillory him no longer, so I won’t identify it, but this one at least makes sense in its own curious way. When we start, mid-level thug Chen Kui-lin (Ethan Juan Ching-tien, Monga, The Abandoned) is angling to make himself the most famous gangster in Taiwan and move up in the ranks, but then he finds out he has terminal cancer, so it puts him on a clock to make it to the top of Taiwan’s 10 Most Wanted list. On the way he runs afoul of a cult (!), gets wrapped in a wannabe-Heat connection between him and the cop chasing him, Chen Hui (Lee Lee-zen), maybe finds love and definitely finds a conscience. I honestly have no clue what to make of these disparate threads. But even though the film is bonkers and all over the map, it’s fun – and darkly funny – in its own weird way, and has enough energy to make you forgive its lapses in logic. It went there, and for its single-minded commitment to its own weirdness, it deserves kudos.
Wong, who rustled up Golden Horse directing and editing nominations (along with action choreographer Hung Shih-hao, and the VFX, sound and score crews), has been absent from filmmaking since contributing a segment to Good Take! in 2016. Before that, of course, he made a splashy debut with the moody, atmospheric Fu Bo, and then the ultra-stylish triad epic Jiang Hu. There were missteps (Revenge: A Love Story), but bottom line Wong was always worth a look. Here he combines his eye for visuals with his worst narrative instincts and it’s… definitely a thing.
The gangster part?
Kui-lin’s saga begins when he marches into the funeral of a prominent rival gang leader and murders another rival gang leader and takes off, Chen in hot pursuit. Make no mistake: this is an intricately staged and white knuckle foot chase that makes the most of Taichung’s (I think) back alleys and cacophonous warehouses. It’s messy and unglamorous and starts the film with a serious bang. After this mano a mano, Kui-lin gets away and Chen is left blind in one eye. Cut to a few years later, and a doctor, Kuei-ching (Hsieh Chiung-hsuan, Dear Tenant), is seeing her own doctor and getting some terrible news about her cancer diagnosis: it’s Stage 4, she’s got six months, maybe a year. But wait. It turns out it’s not her chart, it’s Kui-lin’s, who she knows through her role as Doctor To The Gangster Stars. Okay, sure. Around this time Kui-lin’s beloved granny dies, so with nothing to live for he decides to turn himself into the police, for… reasons (don’t ask; not important). While waiting, he sees a notice about Taiwan’s most-wanted criminals Bullhead (Chen Yi-wen A Sun, A Leg) and Hongkie (Ben Yuen Foo-wa) – ranked 1 and 2. No no no no, he thinks, he’s going to Bon Jovi this shit and go out in a blaze of glory. Off he goes to murder them both and die as Taiwan’s biggest badass.
That’s really all there is to Pig, Snake, Pigeon. Supposedly based on a fifth-century Chinese morality fable (Zhou Chu Eradicates the Three Scourges) it’s essentially a story about a guy who doesn’t want to be forgotten and who will do anything to achieve that (like so many homicidal maniacs). But after the opening act, the movie takes bizarre turns into pitch black comedy and heightened crime drama, wherein Bullhead and Hongkie are painted as so depraved we’re all but compelled to root for the violent, selfish, short-fused Kui-lin. It makes for an interesting spin on the gangster genre, even though the film overall remains a bit under-cooked. The cat-and-mouse bond with Chen is unearned, as is the one with Hongkie’s captive mistress, Hsiao-mei (Gingle Wang Ching, Marry My Dead Body), who’s forced to submit to his deviant sexual predilections (because of course). It’s lucky, then, that Kui-lin’s rescue of Hsiao-mei and his extreme prejudice in dealing with a cult are absurdly hilarious (so’s the cult for that matter), and that Juan somehow pulls a clever character study about an amoral lunatic out of a script Wong should have given one more pass to; there are two movies here that clang when forced to share the same space. Pick one, shave off the epilogue (there were so many good places to end) and tell me who these animals are and The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon may have tipped over into cult classic. Yeah. I meant to say that. — DEK