Movie Review- Wild Hogs

I saw the movie, Wild Hogs with the parental units while I was at home for Thanksgiving. This is a stupid escapist movie and is not that great at that either. Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy and John Travolta are four middle aged men who decide to take a cross country motorcycle ride. Travolta, Lawrence and Allen are not very good in this movie. I am not always a huge fan of any of these three, but there are some movies where I think that each of them are not too bad. So, I am not sure if it is more that they are not really great actors or that the writer did not give them much to work with. All of them are trying to basically recover their youth in a way or to rediscover their "manhood", but this is really dropped during the movie. The movie also attempts at a buddy movie about four guys who go out on the road together and bond as friends and have to ultimately stand up for their friendship, again this is not really brought up till toward the end of the movie. So there is no consistent reason for why these men are riding together and how or why they are friends. The movie is homophobic with John C. McGinley playing a cop who is supposed to be gay. Initially the joke is not too offensive and is Ok as when he initially meets the bikers, you think maybe he is going to arrest them or something. It is kind of weak, but not a real big deal. But as that scene continues and then in a few other scenes throughout the movie, the cop is portrayed as basically a buffoon to be laughed at. He is not shown as having any ability to be professional as a cop and basically just stalks the four main characters. I am not sure that I would expect much less from a film that has as one of its premises the regaining of "manhood" through riding a motorcycle and minor violence. Ray Liotta is also in the film as a supposed badass biker, now he can and has played badasses before and did a good job of it, Goodfellas. But in this film he is horrible, he calls the other four main characters posers as bike riders and yet he appears as the biggest poser of all because he is all tattooed up and supposed to badass and just seems like a banker or lawyer who rides bikes on the weekends. There is nothing wrong with a weekend rider that is essentially what my dad is, but then don't make him into a supposed badass.

So now, I have told you all of the bad things about this film, but there were three bright spots. First, Peter Fonda has a bit part toward the end as a biker. This is an obvious nod toward, Easy Rider, in which Fonda plays a biker. He is very good in this role and it is a nice acknowledgment of his earlier role. Two, Marisa Tomei has a smaller part as the owner of the diner in the small town that the Wild Hogs end up for the last part of the movie and the climax. She also plays the love interest of William H. Macy. In addition to the fact that Tomei is still very attractive, she seemed to be having fun in this movie and did a very good job as the love interest to Macy. Third and finally, I really liked William H. Macy in this film. He plays a computer programmer who is friends with and rides along with the Wild Hogs, but he is not an accomplished rider. He has several times where he falls off the bike or in another way has a pratfall. Since I like physical humor and Macy did a really good job with this, I really did laugh at this stuff. He also does a good job of being this self confessed nerd who also rides a motorcycle. For me, he did making watching this film bearable.

So don't bother renting this film unless you want to get it for $1 or find it on TV and are bored, then watch it, but otherwise you really can skip this film.