Mildly entertaining, despite its being infested with more dumbness than a Jerry Springer episode.
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Writer Brad Copeland ("Arrested Development") can come up with a funny line and a funny sight gag or situation. Now he just has to work on doing it consistently, because "Wild Hogs" is a far more uneven comedy than you'd hope for with star-power like Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, Ray Liotta, and Marisa Tomei. Whatever laugh-out-loud moments there are unfortunately are balanced by almost as many stale or purely dumb ones.
Allen plays a dentist named Doug whose wife and son are helping him watch his cholesterol and basically reminding him that he's officially middle-aged. At one point, when she tells him he should go on this road trip with his friends because he really needs it, my wife and I turned to each other at the same time and said, "City Slickers." Like that Billy Crystal film, "Wild Hogs" features a group of friends who tackle a road-trip adventure as the cure for their mid-life crises. In both films, the mellow and mild-mannered guys come up against things that test their mettle, and, after coming up short, finally prove themselves in the end.
Doug and his friends have been using their bikes and their cute little leather jackets that brand them as "Wild Hogs" as a way to escape the drudgery or disappointment of their lives. Woody (Travolta) is an agent whose marriage to a model is on the skids. Bobby (Lawrence) is forced to go back to emergency plumbing repairs after failing to write a book during a year off. And Dudley (Macy) is pretty much what his name implies, a goofus who plays a composite character that reminds us of the ones Tim Conway and Don Knotts used to hone with great precision.
The "Hogs" are a bunch of Cincinnati guys who decide to bike it to California, and they've got a week to do it . . . hey, some of them are professionals with responsibilities. So they bike here and there, stop for a drink, stop for a swim . . . . If there's a predominant theme to the running gags, aside from Dudley's do-wrongs, it's gay jokes--some of which make you laugh, while others (big surprise) just make you sick, they're some dumb or caricatured. When the Del Fuegos leader, Jack (Liotta), says to himself, "Those assholes got balls," his toadie says, snarling, "I'm gonna put them in my mouth and chew on them. For the "parump-bump," Jack turns to him and says, "You're gonna put what in your mouth???"
Law enforcement officials probably won't give this one thumbs up because all of the cops are either insultingly flaming gay, dumb as a box of donuts, or just plain incompetent. The cops in the small town of Madrid, for example, received their firearms training from the Doom video game. No wonder the town's been taken over by the Del Fuegos. They're as cowed and afraid of the motorcycle gang (originally called the Hell's Angels, before that group sued Disney) as the townspeople are. So when Bobby puts a few of them in their place (not knowing that they let him because their leader wanted the pleasure of doing them in himself), everyone is as pleased as when the "Three Amigos" have their brief moments in the sun before the Mexican bandits strike. You can see the confrontation between the Del Fuegos and the Wild Hogs coming since the middle of the first act.
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[release]21895[/release]