In short: Boar (2017)

A nice Australian family, with Bill Moseley playing the married-in stepdad from the US, have chosen a pretty bad time to visit giant – probably mutant - brother Bernie (Nathan Jones, apparently once a professional strongman known as “Megaman” to which there is nothing to add) in his outback home. For there’s a – most certainly mutant – giant boar roaming this particular stretch of the big Australian nothing, destroying fences, cars, cattle, and killing and sometimes just kidnapping people for its larder.

Why, the thing even murders good old John Jarratt, despite the man for once not playing a serial killer but a stand-up guy. Well, and it will murder large parts of the rest of the cast, too. Obviously.

Well, Razorback Chris Sun’s Boar clearly ain’t. There are certainly no ambitions visible on screen for this to be artistic or deep. This is very consciously built to be just a really fun monster flick without pretensions but also – thankfully - with little irony concerning its own genre.

Even though I wouldn’t exactly call Boar a comedy, the film has quite a few consciously goofy elements, scenes that are probably in it because they’re good fun instead of there to do much for either the plot or the characters. But then, once you encounter the scene where Nathan Jones rides around the countryside while rapping to that, ahem, classic “Ice Ice Baby”, you just might be like me and stop wanting it any other way. The film does take most of the violence and the boar attacks seriously enough, though, or as seriously as a film including something like the dramatic scene in which Jones has a knife fight with the mangy giant thing can get.

Otherwise, the film has quite a bit of fun with presenting many an outback dweller cliché, but with a twist, so everyone’s entertainingly and somewhat hilariously foul mouthed, bar owners solve the problem of grabby customers by kicking their ass, and so on and so forth. These scenes are generally so entertaining, they don’t ever feel like the filler they actually are, but rather like the film having its fun just letting the characters interact with one another and that this is indeed how rural Australia rolls.


The boar– a mixture of practical effects and CGI I believe – is looking rather impressive too for most of the time, coming over as an actual physical presence in most of its scenes, and certainly as a dire threat to life and limb of the characters. In general, Sun is as competent a hand at the action scenes as he is at the funny character bits, so there’s little at all to stand in the way of what seems to be the Boar’s main goal: being a fun movie about very Australian Australians fighting a big ass boar.