Wild Hogs

Stress, boredom and middle age have set buddies Woody (John Travolta), Doug (Tim Allen), Bobby (Martin Lawrence), and Dudley (William H. Macy) on the path to midlife crisis. The weekend ritual of riding their urban choppers is no longer enough to mask the numbness of their routine lives. They need to take it up a notch — a road trip is in order.

This, of course, translates as a vapid Disney movie, and Wild Hogs is indeed a vapid Disney movie in just about every conceivable way. Even the usually interesting Macy manages to be uninteresting here. In fact, the cast of Wild Hogs could only have been interesting in a movie about over-the-hill movie stars making a movie about over-the-hill regular guys slipping into the mind-numbing pointlessness of middle age — but that would have been an ironic.

Wild Hogs is not ironic, it's just silly — which, to be fair, is all it ever wants to be. Thus, the boys take their road trip and silly things immediately begin to happen that often involve poop, falling off their motorcycles and more poop. There is a girl (Marisa Tomei), whom Dudley falls for, and a biker gang led by Ray Liotta, who looks no more reasonable in biker chaps than Travolta, Allen, Macy or Lawrence, yet we are expected to consider him as though he does. Vexing.

Funny? Wild Hogs occasionally is, and it's pithy in the way that all Disney movies are. It's also homophobic and racist but bares no overt malice, as it is plainly unaware of its passive homophobia and latent racism. The film certainly speaks to something true about the weight of time, age and unfulfilled expectations — just nothing that hasn't been spoken to many, many times before in ironic, or at least much funnier, movies. Distributor: Buena Vista
Cast: Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy
Director: Walt Becker
Screenwriter: Brad Copeland
Producers: Mike Tollin, Brian Robbins and Todd Lieberman
Genre: Comedy
Rating: PG-13 for crude and sexual content and some violence
Running time:
Release date: March 2, 2007