Slapdash and uninspired in the story and voice acting departments, Hitpig! is an animated adventure that will only appeal to the youngest, least discerning of viewers. Best enjoyed by the age bracket that still can’t comprehend full sentences, Hitpig! isn’t an awful movie, but just more mid-level, forgettable content for the kiddie grist mill. Spun off from characters created by legendary Bloom County cartoonist and author Berkeley Breathed, there’s a kernel of a good idea in here, but no one involved with Hitpig! bothered to follow through on figuring out the best possible version of this story.
Hitpig (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) is a bounty hunting swine travelling the globe in a tricked out van, tracking down lost and escaped animals for money. In need of a quick infusion of cash after his chief rival – animal rights do-gooder Leticia (Brazilian singer/songwriter Anitta) – hoodwinks him, Hitpig lucks into a million dollar bounty. Circus impresario Leapin’ Lord (Rainn Wilson) has lost tabs on his prized dancing elephant Pickles (Lilly Singh) mere days before a performance that’s destined to take his career to new heights. Hitpig tracks Pickles down in London, lying to her and saying he’s going to help the pachyderm find the family she never met back in India, when he’s really returning her to Las Vegas. In typical Midnight Run fashion, nothing goes according to plan, and the hunter and his mark start to form a unique bond across their whirlwind adventure.
The script for Hitpig! is as basic as it gets by kiddie movie standards. String together a bunch of colourful, loosely associated set pieces. Pack them with slapstick, needless repetition, D-grade puns, dad jokes, pop culture references and soundtrack choices that are far past their prime, and run all of it until the ground until any sense of surprise, charm, or fun has evaporated. In terms of its writing, Hitpig! feels like a throwback to the 1980s, and not in a complimentary way. It looks and moves like a base cash grab trying to sell a toy line that hasn’t established itself. There’s one gag that doesn’t work, but at least I understand it, and it involves the recurring appearance of a kid who keeps playing video games despite crazy things always happening around him. It’s a hack joke, but also a self-own, as I think a lot of kids who sit down to watch this will lose interest early on and leave this thing running in the background while they look at some other screen they have more investment in instead.
Visually Hitpig! is going for something highly fantastical and largely cartoonish, which is fine. Nothing that happens in Hitpig! could stand up to any logical reasoning, but this is also a kiddie movie, so I’m willing to overlook bits that most adults would find categorically stupid. But in an age where animation has grown by leaps and bounds, there’s a flatness to Hitpig! that makes one wonder where the whole thing went awry. The character designs are basic, especially the titular character who puzzlingly looks like the worst of the bunch. The settings have a curious amount of negative space, and the details that can be found within them are also basic. It’s colourful, but there’s not much to actually look at throughout much of Hitpig!.
Sinking things further is a voice cast that isn’t up to the task of elevating any of this, with the exception of Singh’s highly loveable elephant, the only true bright spot in the film. Wilson’s villain is all silly voice and no personality. Hannah Gadsby, Flavor Flav, and RuPaul all clock in for paycheques as a toughie Koala, a cooking show host, and a flatulent, radioactive polecat, respectively, none of them earning as much as a smile, let alone a laugh. And Sudeikis’ hero couldn’t sound less invested if his lines were generated by AI, reaching a new level of sarcasm that sounds like it’s bordering on contempt. Other than Singh, no one is bringing enough energy to sound like they want to be there, and there’s a knowing resignation that this degree of stunt casting was all this low budget production could afford.
I don’t believe that most movies are made with bad intentions. Somewhere along the way, someone genuinely had to believe in this property of it never would’ve gone forward. And the idea isn’t a bad one, and one can imagine more fun scenarios for these characters than the ones put forward by directors Cinzia Angelini and David Feiss. It’s not that I was disappointed by Hitpig! and wanted it to give me more, but rather that by the end of its 80 minutes, I felt like I wasn’t given anything at all. It’s a very weak excuse for a family movie, but it didn’t have to be this way.
Hitpig! is now playing in theatres everywhere.
