Skip this movie and just watch the trailer online for free. You'll get all the funny jokes, less of the homophobia and not waste your freakin' time. This tired, slapstick CITY SLICKERS wanna-be is a career low for William H. Macy, who I hope received a nice paycheck for his effort. Tim Allen, John Travolta and Martin Lawrence have all been in worse, but that's not saying much is it.
The set-up is simple. Four middle-aged men want to reclaim some of their youth and manliness so they set out on a motorcycle road trip. Doug Madsen (Allen, CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS) is a dentist with high-cholesterol who finds rebellion against his family's wimpy opinion on him by eating a stick of butter. Woody Stevens (Travolta, BATTLEFIELD EARTH) is some kind of rich businessman who is married to a swimsuit model, who is actually in the process of losing it all. Bobby Davis (Lawrence, BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE 2) is a henpecked plumber who took the last year off to write a how to book. Dudley Frank (Macy, FARGO) is a clueless computer programmer who barely knows how to ride his bike, which is a fact that is reinforced over and over again.
So on the road, the foursome run into embarrassing moment after embarrassing moment until the plot final arrives in the form of Jack (Ray Liotta, GOODFELLAS) and his bar full of cliché, mean bikers, who are severely offended by the mere presence of these suburban biker posers. As the trailer informs us, Woody accidentally blows up the biker's bar and they hit the road after them. At their next stop, Dudley falls for a pretty diner owner named Maggie (Marisa Tomei, MY COUSIN VINNIE) and the foursome decides to stay in town for the chili fest. But Woody worries that the bikers will catch up with them and he hasn't been too honest with the others about what really happened when he went back to the bar.
The film surprised me only in that it didn't follow the typical path that I expected, it followed a different one. However, once the friends arrive at the small town, the plot slavishly follows all the clichés right to the end. As I mentioned before, all the jokes are in the trailer. Most of the additional jokes are only revised version of the jokes in the trailer. Director Walt Becker (VAN WILDER) mines the same jokes for laughs repetitively. He's like a high teenager amused by a joke who replays it over and over and over again finding it oh so humorous every time. The studio should have provided joints to all the audience so that we could find some humor in it. But they couldn't do that because this crude, homophobic film is being subtly marketed as a family outing.
And homophobic is the key word. Why does male bonding and homophobia have to go together? One or two jokes can be funny, if done right, but not every other one. The very metrosexual fat man at the cook-off singing karaoke is embarrassing and is a shining encapsulation of everything wrong with this film. It's a completely random homophobia joke and we not only get to hear him sing one mismatched song, but what seems like four of them.
As for the actors, Macy is the only one that should be able to look himself in the mirror. He's the only one to play his character with any level of subtly, which actually saves some of the material from time to time. His performance actually made me not instantly realize how awfully written his character was. He's too clueless for a man who actually comes out of his house from time to time. What does it say about Travolta when Tim Allen is subtler? It says to me that he lost all faith in the material and decided to ham it up trying to force humor into this roadkill.
WILD HOGS is a total mess. The clichéd characters are set up, set on the road to spin their wheels for awhile and arrive at a destination we've seen a million times before. None of the characters attain any level of believability. The relentless and obvious slapstick shtick works like a sugar rush, making you laugh at first then lose your taste for more and finally making you feel sick. Walt Disney bought themselves a hit with this cast. But this is a trip from hell that everyone will either forget in a week or try to blot out of their memory forever.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
