A Movie Review
of A War Pigs (2015)
By Lance Zedric
Normally, I don’t review movies that are more than a few months old, but I was in hog heaven when I rented the World War II action flick, War Pigs (Schuetzle – 2015), at the video store today for only a dollar. With a title like that at such a low price, surely, I could root up an artistic truffle or two, carve out a tasty scrap of literary ham, and feed it to my porcine pals on the internet. But despite good intentions, War Pigs failed to bring the home bacon—or in this case—the bratwurst.
In the fall of 1944, Army captain Jack Wosick (ably played by Luke Goss), leads his squad on a patrol in occupied France in which several men are killed, including his friend, Sgt. McGreevy (portrayed by former MMA tough guy Chuck Liddell). Wosick is unfairly demoted and awaits courts martial, but Major A.J. Redding, an oddball officer freakishly portrayed by plastic surgery antihero Mickey Rourke, offers him a chance at redemption by leading a rag-tag squad of infantry misfits, aka War Pigs, on a secret reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines to collect information on the V-3, a new secret weapon developed by the Nazis that could change the course of the war.
Captain Hans Picault, a German anti-Nazi serving with the French Foreign Legion, played by formidable Swedish kickboxing champion and real life genius Dolph Lungren (Drago in Rocky IV—or was it V?), helps Wosick train an forgettable cast for an even less memorable operation. Despite being a little long in the tusk, Lungren is no pork chop and turns in a serviceable performance in this low-grade sausage fest that featured fewer plot twists than a straight pigtail.
Although the writing was atrocious, the storyline weak, and the acting average at best, I still found a few pearls among the swine. Even the most finicky WWII aficionado could hog out on the fine cinematography and outstanding array of German weapons and uniforms shown in such a low-budget film. But at the end of the day, War Pigs was a dramatic stinker that left me squealing “no, no, no” all the way home!