Hitpig (now streaming on Peacock) is the final form of a story’s curious evolution: Bloom County comic strip creator Berkeley Breathed wrote a children’s picture book, Pete and Pickles, about the unlikely friendship between a pig and an elephant. It’s odd and funny and whimsical, as all Breathed works tend to be, and its transformation into an action-packed, fart-joke-ridden animated kiddie flick about a bounty-hunter pig who snags an elephant for a million-dollar payday could be a diehard cynic’s go-to example of Hollywood cynicism: the only way to make a gentle story marketable to the moviegoing masses? Just add violence! Not that Hitpig was a crossover success, mind you; it had a quick-blip theatrical release that grossed about $2 million before it disappeared into the streaming milieu, which, frankly, is where it belongs.
The Gist: Needle drop: “Born to be Wild.” Two seconds into the movie, and we’re already groaning. We’re subject to the origin story of Hitpig (Jason Sudeikis), a totally misnomered character, because he’s a bounty hunter and not a hitman, but hey, the name is catchy, and they went with it anyway, and had he been a paid assassin, the movie might’ve been a total failure as a slab of kid-friendly fare. Anyway, Hitpig was mentored by a human who collected bounties on escaped animals, until she was eaten by a crocodile, after which our guy went solo. Years later, Hitpig lives out of his flying VW rocket-bus, zooming from gig to gig and practicing his amateur chef skills in-between. Meanwhile, we’re subject to a sideplot about a polecat named Polecat (RuPaul) who swallows plutonium and escapes from a nuclear power plant in the Arctic Circle – and I would say this makes more sense when Polecat turns up later in the movie, but to be honest, it makes zero sense in any comprehensible context. Oh, and the plutonium exposure has armed Polecat with nuclear farts.
Also meanwhile, in Las Vegas, a deranged circus performer known only as Leapin’ Lord of the Leotard (Rainn Wilson) treats his various stage animals like garbage. Among those abusees is Pickles (Lilly Singh), a naive elephant who’s kept in line by her cruel owner’s snappy crocodile. She yearns for freedom, and gains it once superhero-costumed animal-rights activist Leticia dos Anos (Anitta) liberates her. So Leotard guy hires Hitpig to capture Pickles for a $1 million bounty, and Hitpig successfully snags the elephant from Leticia in London, but is forced to take her back to Vegas on a commercial flight, which goes poorly, because there’s still like an hour of the movie left, far too soon for anything to be resolved.
What with this, that and the other, Hitpig finds himself at the dramatic fulcrum of conflicting interests: Lord of the Leotard is his big payday. Leticia sees him as self-interested, self-serving scum. And Pickles just wants her freedom, a point-of-view that softens Hitpig, because a big, silly, fun-loving pachyderm shouldn’t be forced to plie and pirouette at the whim of a sleazy charlatan who keeps her locked in a dark trailer. So what we have here is a good old-fashioned crisis of conscience plot, where the morally compromised protagonist must choose to either do the right thing or do what he always does and stay in his quasi-happy little rut. What will he do? NO SPOILERS, but it might just involve piecing together a (sigh) ragtag group of misfits to stage a high-stakes rescue mission.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Midnight Run would like a word. So would Mars Needs Moms, a Breathed-related project that lives in middle-tier infamy on the list of all-time biggest Hollywood bombs.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: There’s enough exuberant gee-whizziness in Singh’s characterization of Pickles to make the performance stand out among all the paychecks being cashed.
Memorable Dialogue: “Some guys cut the cheese, but you, brother, you destroyed the cheese.” – Hitpig, honing in on the film’s recurring thematic content
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: I don’t want to speculate about the tradeoff between compromise and financial compensation regarding this particular project, but Hitpig is pretty far removed from the source material, which Breathed originally pitched as a TV series for preschoolers – a far cry from the movie’s desperate scatological humor and the occasional slightly age-inappropriate aside tossed in to keep any adults in the audience from getting a much-needed nap. Not that anyone will ever sleep through this thing, noisy and obnoxious as it is, and populated with grotesque, deranged character designs that tweak’s Breathed’s endearing weirdo style in precisely the wrong direction.
Beyond tapping into the underappreciated realm of leotard-based comedy, Hitpig offers near-zero surprises in its jokes and plot, which recycles mismatched-buddy junk from hundreds of moves preceding it and trades in shrugworthy notions about animal rights and, if you really stretch it, the value of diverse companionship. The jukebox soundtrack is a prime example of its lack of inspiration, wheezing out tired Gloria Estefan and Pat Benetar needle drops. As a gag machine, it’s lazy, mistaking caffeinated zaniness for pace and energy, and one-liners range from “I think I just cracked a baby-back rib” to “That little toilet is not designed for what I’ve got to do.” And again: anuses expelling purple mushroom clouds. A hyperbolic representation of Hitpig’s lousiness, but an accurate one.
Our Call: I nuclear-fart in this movie’s general direction. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.