War Pigs (2015)

This is one that's been in the can for a long time, so long that I had to rewatch it for this review. I think the reason for this is two-fold: the film isn't all that remarkable as far as Dolph's filmography, and it's been available on Tubi seemingly in perpetuity, so there hasn't been a lot of urgency to make it happen. At this point though we don't have a lot of Dolph left before we're delving into things like Fat Slags and Sharnado 5. In addition to us, our friends at Bulletproof Action and Mitch at The Video Vacuum have covered this, so you can see what they thought as well. Now, without any further ado.

War Pigs has Luke Goss as a Captain for the US Army in WWII who has been demoted after a mission goes FUBAR due to bad orders from the top. That's when cowboy colonel Mickey Rourke swoops in with a proposition: work with French Foreign Legion Captain Dolph, and lead a ragtag group of soldiers known as the War Pigs across enemy lines to get intel on a potential super weapon the Nazis are creating. After a lot of training to get them ship-shape, Dolph and Goss take their men on the mission, and things start to turn FUBAR again. Now it's time for Goss's moment of redemption.

After watching this, I thought, there was enough material here for a 43-minute episode of a syndicated TV series--and when I looked at Bulletproof's review, they said something similar. I know that's a common take I give on these films, but this really had that vibe. A good chunk of the film was getting the guys into shape--like I think the mission was only the last 30 minutes. With the film's slim budget, I wonder if that was by necessity as opposed to by design. Either way, we're left with something that isn't quite there. We've seen the Dirty Dozen paradigm before, and while this wasn't quite that, it was in that vein. "Let's whip the guys into shape!" "Look at them struggling up those hills!" "Oh no, the tough one to crack is crackin' foxy again, now it's going to be tougher on everyone!" And on that score, some of the more fun elements we could have had with a period piece were missing. There were no 40s slang terms like "crackin' foxy," these were just 2010s bros dressed in military fatigues that could've been WWII, combined with Dolph as a Legionnaire, Rourke as a cowboy colonel, and Goss looking cool smoking cigarettes. All the same, the end was kind of fun, and on that score I would've loved watching this as part of the War Pigs 90s syndicated TV series at 3am on a Saturday night while I'm eating cold burritos and trying to get the room to stop spinning after a night of drinking. As a 90-minute movie on Tubi, maybe notsomuch.

This is now 62 Dolph movies, extending his record for the most on the site; but this is his first since November, so it's been over seven months. From the time I started the blog 15 years ago, this is the longest non-hiatus break in Dolph posts ever. I don't know how this has happened, except that I had a lot of podcast episodes that I wanted to do accompanying posts for, plus I was trying to get some other names up, and next thing I knew it was 7 months. The other thing is we don't have a lot of Dolph left. We have 4Got10 and Kindergarten Cop 2 from this mid-2010s period; and then recent ones like Castle Falls and Pups Alone; but from there it's Small Apartments, Fat Slags, Seal Team, things like that. Do we even bother with those? And part of me's like do I even bother with this one when I'm just getting it up here to have them all? But then there's the Dolph factor, where every scene with him is better for having him in it. It's the Dolph Effect, the reason why he's the Babe Ruth of DTV films, and in that sense, this is worth it for him. He's going to be 65 in November, so hopefully by then we'll have 65 movies up for him, making him the only actor on the site to have that distinction--the closest is the only other member of the 50 Club, Gary Daniels, who has 54 films and just turned 59.

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Mickey Rourke is back. This is now his third film on the site. Of all the Hollywood stars who have gone the DTV route, Rourke is the most fascinating for me, because he's almost indicative of how that world changed in the mid-2010s. In 2008, after a career drought, he reemerges and is nominated for an Oscar for The Wrestler, which he was amazing in; and that same year he's great in The Informers; then two years later he's a villain in a Marvel movie, Iron Man 2. The thing is though, the film ecosystem was starting to shrink at the same time, and the DTV stuff was there for him to make a quick buck. Between the three films of his we've reviewed, The Expendables, Skin Traffik, and now this, he's had barely any screentime, but like his friend Eric Roberts, his small scenes enhance the film. It begs the question: is it more worth it to spend the budget on a day of shooting with Mickey Rourke, or spend it on more realistic effects--as this movie used CGIs for the bullets and shots hitting people. I kind of lean more toward the former, I know the bullets and blood are fake either way, but the Rourke is always real.

Somehow Luke Goss hadn't had a tag until now. I'm not sure why I was avoiding that for so long, but with this post we're fixing that. This is now 10 movies on the site, which is a pretty prodigious number, so he should've been tagged before this. He plays an American again, and like most of the film's anachronisms, he's the most modern American bro-y, yet at the same time he does a great job smoking cigarettes and looking cool. Like other Brits, like Scott Adkins and Bruce Payne, he's much better with his natural accent, but also because he's affecting an American accent, he affects a modern one in this. I wish he had watched some 40s movies and tried to do that American accent instead. A good Bogey would've been perfect. Anyway, I don't know what it is about Goss more than someone like Adkins that makes his American accent turn him into a total American bro guy, but maybe it has to do with the fact that his brother Matt has a residency in Las Vegas. Maybe he's only studied American males there in that environment, so all he knows are the dudes who swoop in for a weekend, dump a bunch on bottle service, destroy a hotel suite, maybe get lucky with a lady, then drive back to LA and their fiancées and pretend none of it happened despite the fact the pictures are all over Instagram. He's reflecting our worse back at us.

Finally, when the War Pigs have finished their training and are ready to go on their mission, they're given new patches. This might have been the most authentic WWII moment of the film for me. I remember my grandfather, who passed away last November just shy of his 97th birthday, never really talked about his time in WWII, but one day I was visiting him in Florida, and we were watching a History Channel show about when Mt. Vesuvius erupted during the war, and he was like "I was there for that." He told me about how he'd injured his eye--an injury that made him blind in that eye--and was recovering at a military hospital in that area, and then had to go help evacuate residents. He then took me into his room, where he pulled out a container that had all of the stuff he still had from the war, and among that he showed me his patches. They looked very similar to that one in the way they were constructed, especially one he got for all the patrols he'd been on. Before he passed, he moved back up to New England, and I'm not sure what happened to that container, but either way it was a cool moment with him.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is currently on Tubi, and my hunch is it will always be on Tubi. If you've seen a lot of other Dolph and are closing in on the end of the road like I am, give this one a watch. It's not his worst, and it's not his best, it just is.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3779300

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!