RSS Wild Hogs
Filed in Blog, Reviews| Wild Hogs is a hollywoodified version of the classic male-bonding road trip.
Four guys, Doug, Bobby, Dudley and Woody, played by Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy and John Travolta respectively, are a “gang” of four riding their Harleys with varying degrees of incompetence. They’re also feeling their middle age coming on, and as a kind of antidote to variously being hen-pecked, losing their livelihood, feeling like a nothing or just being bored spitless with life as it is, they go on a road trip together. |
The parts of this movie that I enjoyed had to do with the road trip itself — I have a soft spot for images of bikes moving through fantastic scenery. The scene where they are covered in bugs elicited a giggle. Actually, I chuckled at quite a few of the scenes, but the humor was slapstick and that’s one of the things I like.
But the characters were wooden and clichéd, the script stultifying, the situations unreal. Basically, at a “real” biker bar one of the people has his bike taken away from him by the “real” bikers, a gang called the Del Fuegos. The Travolta character sneaks back to take the bike back, something that he achieves by emptying out the gas tanks of every bike in the bar (and how many of those were there, anyway?) This ultimately results in an explosion the minute the bikers come out and light up a cigarette, and the rest of the movie centers around the inevitable shake-down in the small New Mexico town of Madrid (a real place).
From the point of view of poking fun at born-again bikers, this does reasonably well. But it’s ultimately unsatisfying, with the plot, dialog and acting just plain lame, and has no depth at all. Though I did like the geek-guy meets lady-cowboy romantic sub-plot, but then, of all those actors, I like William H. Macy the best. :)
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