by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo credit: The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon/Facebook
DESPITE GARNERING A number of awards and otherwise being a capably executed film, The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon ultimately proves an uneven work. This is primarily because of the movie’s failure to develop compelling characters or a cohesive narrative.
The movie follows hitman Chen Kui-lin, who gains fame in Taiwan’s underworld after executing a prominent gang boss at a funeral–a scene set up in what is possibly a reference to Taiwanese New Wave classic Dust of Angels.
After the killing, Chen lies low for several years to avoid capture, having skyrocketed to national fame. But after the death of his grandmother and learning that he has terminal lung cancer, he decides to turn himself into the police. But when he tries to do so, he fails to be recognized–causing Chen to realize that he has since been surpassed in fame by other gangsters.
This leads Chen to decide to go out with a bang before turning himself in. As the third most-wanted criminal in Taiwan, Chen decides that he will kill the second and first-ranking criminals in Taiwan before turning himself in. These are, respectively, a gangster from Hong Kong living in Taiwan called “Hongkie”, and the mysterious “Bullhead”, who has disappeared from the public eye.
This sets the stage for The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon’s episodic plot, then. The movie is largely broken into two halves, the first revolving around Chen’s efforts to assassinate Hongkie and then his attempt on Bullhead’s life.
Photo credit: The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon/Facebook
Of these two halves of the movie, it is undoubtedly the second half that is the more interesting. Hongkie proves a somewhat generic character, with no real distinguishing features except for that he is a Hongkonger. To emphasize this point, Hongkie primarily speaks with Chen in Cantonese, though relatively few Taiwanese understand Cantonese and Chen Kui-lin’s apparent coincidental fluency in Cantonese detracts from the realism of the movie.
By contrast, Chen’s pursuit of Bullhead leads him to a mysterious religious cult. This second half is not only more visually interesting, but much more interesting plot-wise than the first half. Just the parts of the movie about the cult prove too different in tone than what came before, almost as if The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon were two films awkwardly lopped together.
There is no shortage of capable acting in The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon, whether that is Ethan Juan’s Chen Kui-lin, Wang Gingle’s love interest for Chen, Hsiao-mei, and Chen Yi-wen’s turn as Bullhead. As with many of his other roles, Chen Yi-wen’s acting is especially notable, and thankfully he is here not typecast in one of his standard villainous roles.
Many of the sequences of the film, too, are capably shot despite their technical capacity. The movie is not uneven in terms of its technical merits, at least.
Yet it is ultimately the lack of cohesiveness of the story as a whole that causes The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon to prove less realized a work than one would have otherwise hoped for. Still, if one is hoping only for an action thriller, it at least satisfies.