While other board game-themed movies have floundered and failed, “Hungry Hungry Hippos” will stand as a paragon of filmmaking for years to come. The screenwriters of “Monopoly” and “Battleship” hobbled their scripts with unbelievable plot holes and two-dimensional characters, but in “HHH” we find an incredibly dark and satisfying tale, in which the last four surviving hippos on their home island are forced to compete with one another to survive.

The political allusions are obvious, and the hippos reminisce about the good old days where food (read: oil) was abundant. Throughout cleverly paced flashback scenes, we see the transition where a grand and mighty hippo civilization is brought to its knees by misuse of resources.

The most striking emotional moment is when the hippo Riley (Nicholas Cage), enraged and emasculated after the loss of his wife and son, screams for all the world to hear “There were never enough balls! We kept on sating ourselves, and we knew there weren’t enough balls!”

There is a great deal of intrigue as the last remnants of a decimated pod forage together, but a final dearth of food precipitates hte final clash between the four over the scarce little white balls, signs of sustenance now gone from this once lush island.

Exhausted by hunger, they merely hold out their necks over and over, hoping that they will be fed through the grace of God, none realizing that the winner faces nothing more than a forlorn demise in a barren hellscape.

I won’t tell you which hippo wins, but the big twist comes when it turns out that one of them was aware of the others’ grand weakness, and sits slightly downhill from the others, resulting in his victory. His hollow, terrible victory.