Wild Hogs review

"I thought we were doing the wild and free thing," Bobby (Martin Lawrence) inquires of the motorbike trip he and his three friends are taking across the country. "More like the old and lame thing," retorts Doug (Tim Allen). The same exchange could have equally been about Wild Hogs, a dumb and silly thing which sets its sights very low and even then barely reaches them. Only the comic talents of its strong cast are able to extract any humour from this corny caper.

Wild Hogs conjours memories of City Slickers, though instead of three suburban friends responding to their mid-life crisis by donning chaps and going on a cattle drive, here four suburban friends put on their leather jackets and go a motorbike drive. The outcome, directed erratically by Walt Becker, is more ludicrous and less endearing than its 1991 counterpart. But in a country where the preposterous Night At The Museum is box office dynamite, clearly stupidity is a commodity embraced by American movie audiences, which bodes well for Wild Hogs.

The film sets out its stall early on, as the sight of the dorky Dudley (William H. Macy) almost being decapitated when riding into a signpost solicits one of Wild Hogs' biggest laughs. This is not sophisticated humour we're talking about. The following ninety minutes are punctuated with similar slapstick moments along with a liberal sprinkling of homophobic gags, the latter seemingly a prerequisite in comedies involving male-bonding.

One of the stock screenplay templates is the ‘fish out of water' plot. Four more unlikely candidates to form a bike club - the Wild Hogs - and head from Cincinnati to California on their Harleys is hard to imagine. There's the dentist (Doug), the drain cleaner (Bobby), the computer geek (Dudley) and businessman (Woody - John Travolta). That four more contrasting people would be even be friends is difficult to swallow, that they would share a common love of big motorbikes is implausible . . . or comedy genius.

The Wild Hogs' cross-country adventure encompasses an encounter with a gay policeman (an amusingly lustful John C. McGinley); the Del Fuegos, a group of renegade bikers led by the sadistic Jack (a suitably edgy Ray Liotta) and a small town that's home to the fetching Maggie (Marisa Tomei) and a surreal Chile Festival. With four good comedic actors vying for laughs, and with few genuine gags to work with (Dudley getting a tattoo of the Apple Mac logo being one example), they indulge in a little playful one-upmanship. In the end, Macy's less extravagant approach proves the most successful.

The ending features an amusing cameo from the Easy Rider himself, Peter Fonda, who as a gnarly biker offers the weekend warriors two key bits of advice, "Ride hard or stay home" and "lose the watches." With barely enough laughs to sustain their first outing, let's just hope the Wild Hogs heed his words next time and stay home.

Kevin Murphy