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Wild Hogs Wild Hogs is a bland, unadventurous, middle-of-the-road movie: one that's had any sharp edges filed down into child-friendly bumps. This film has mid-life crisis wish fulfilment written all over it.
A quartet of suburban biker wannanbes decide to inject a bit of adventure and spontaneity into their lives by going on a road-trip across America from East to West. The guys—Doug (Tim Allen), Woody (John Travolta), Bobby (Martin Lawrence) and Dudley (William H Macy)—saddle up and drive their hogs across the glorious countryside until they attract the unwanted attentions of a camp highway patrolman (John C McGinley), who is convinced that the group is gay.
Next they fall foul of the Del Fuego gang of bikers when they stop at their bar out in the desert and inadvertently blow it up. The Del Fuegos are led by Jack (Ray Liotta, camping up the badness) who tracks the Wild Hogs to a sleepy town where Dudley falls in love with Maggie (Marisa Tomei), who owns the local restaurant.
Talented actor he may be, but William H Macy has a face somewhere between a bag of spanners and a crumpled paper bag, and a more unlikely pairing between him and the still radiant Tomei you couldn't hope to find. Brad Copeland, the writer, seems to be suggesting that if you‘re a bit flabby in the middle and your best years are behind you, you can still get a decent chick without trying.
And in another example of wishful thinking, Copeland implies that four middle-aged guys can take on a whole biker gang and suffer nothing worse than a comedy bruise and be slightly out of breath.
To be fair, the fights comes from the Dukes of Hazzard school of realism, but I was hoping for far more from a writer who's turned in several scripts for My Name Is Earl.
Something else I was hoping for more of was comedy. Sure, Wild Hogs is occasionally amusing; but to call it funny is stretching things a little. There's a running gag, for example, that involves our motorcycle heroes riding into things, like street signs, that is modestly droll the first four or five times but soon starts wearing thin.
The coda during the end credits, which is a mock clip from the ABC show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition will probably be lost on non-US audiences, who neither know nor care who the fuck Ty Pennington is.
There is, however, a nice nod to fans of Easy Rider (1969) with a cool cameo from Peter Fonda (dude, do you really need the money that badly?) and an appearance from Paul Teutul Senior and Paulie Junior of American Chopper fame.
It's not that Wild Hogs is a bad film, it's just that it's so inoffensive, insipid and banal it drives me crazy that audiences seem to be lapping it up. The healthy $39.7 million US opening weekend will doubtless give Tim Allen's flagging movie career a lift and have the producers popping champagne corks while dreaming up scenarios for a sequel.
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