This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris review Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, starring Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld, a reclusive Oregon truffle hunter whose beloved pig is stolen in the night. On paper, it sounds like the setup for a strange little revenge thriller. In practice, it is something quieter and much sadder: a film about grief, food, memory, authenticity and the terrible fact that not every loss can be fixed.
The dads begin with Cage in full anti-Cage mode. Robin lives in the woods, barely speaks, looks as if hygiene has become an optional philosophy, and shares his cabin with the pig who helps him find valuable truffles. His only regular contact is Amir, played by Alex Wolff, a young buyer who arrives in a yellow Camaro, listens to self-improvement classical-music lessons, and seems desperate to perform the role of a successful man.
When Robin is attacked and the pig is taken, the film appears to be lining up a “John Wick with a pig” story. Instead, Robin and Amir move through a hidden Portland restaurant underworld where reputation matters more than violence. The trail takes them from a furious pork-belly seller to junkies in a trailer park, then into an underground service-worker fight club where Robin simply allows himself to be beaten so that the right people will remember his name.
That name is the key to the film. Robin Feld was once a legendary chef, and the city’s food world still treats him like a myth. The dads especially enjoy the restaurant scene at Eurydice, where Robin confronts a former employee now trapped in a sterile fine-dining performance. He does not shout or threaten him. He just tells him that the food is technically correct but dead, reminds him of the honest pub he once wanted to run, and gently dismantles the life he has built around pretending.
The conversation naturally detours into fine dining, restaurant pretension, Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay, The Fat Duck, street food in Bangkok, and whether chefs are artists, monsters, addicts, or simply people who would like to smoke something and go home. Cris, having actually worked with chefs for decades, is particularly unconvinced by the romantic idea that a chef would remember exactly what every customer ate years earlier.
The emotional climax comes when Robin cooks for Darius, Amir’s father, who arranged the theft. Rather than fight him, Robin recreates a meal he once cooked for Darius and his wife, a meal Amir remembers as one of the only happy moments from his childhood. The food unlocks memory and grief, and Darius finally admits the truth: the pig was killed the night she was stolen. Robin’s search was already too late.
The ending refuses easy satisfaction. Robin does not get revenge, does not rescue the pig, and does not return to the life he had before. He washes the blood from his face, goes back to the cabin, and finally listens to the tape of his late wife singing Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire.” Reegs finds that lack of catharsis frustrating at first but ultimately fitting, because life does not always end with you getting your pig back.
Verdicts are positive. Sidey enjoys the quieter Nicolas Cage performance and gives it a bacon recommend, even though he wanted the pig restored. Dan appreciates the 90-minute runtime, the odd characters and the way the film uses cooking rather than violence as its final weapon. Reegs likes that it resists the revenge-thriller version of itself and becomes a parable about grief and letting go. Cris enjoys the look and mood, while remaining extremely suspicious of all chef mythology.
So the Bad Dads verdict on Pig is a bacon recommend: a small, mournful, oddly funny Nicolas Cage film that promises a stolen-pig revenge quest and instead gives you blood, truffles, restaurant trauma, Springsteen, and the painful truth that sometimes the pig is not coming home.
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