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Film
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Riders on the Norm
Wild Hogs’ laughs aren’t lasting, but it allows just enough room for its cast to showcase what they do best.
Friday, March 2, 2007
By Brent Simon
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Touchstone Pictures
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Has Saturday and Sunday night fever
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Wild Hogs is a curious film.
On the one hand, the comedy - about a quartet of friends who hit the road in a rather vaguely defined attempt to reclaim their youthful, masculine spirits - is driven by overly demonstrative sitcom-type acting, anchored by a number of flat, desultory set pieces, and set to all the music cues (Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” George Thorogood & The Destroyers’ “Who Do You Love,” AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” The Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider”) you wholly expect. It even has an atrocious sequence which is one of my new pet peeves - a scene in which someone on a computer inadvertently stumbles across a deviant sex web site (and always a loud one, at that), only to then be unable to shut it down, despite their mad pressing of buttons and checking of cables.
We’re just over two months into 2007, and, alongside Diane Keaton’s Because I Said So, we’ve already had two such idiotic scenes unleashed upon audiences; current Vegas over-under odds place the year’s cumulative, sigh-inducing tally at seven.
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Touchstone Pictures
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Big momma rules his house
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On the other hand, if a movie can ever be described as, say, a bit greater than the expected sum of its disingenuous parts, that might be the best way to explain the fleeting entertainment that Wild Hogs provides. There definitely isn’t much in the way of insight into the “weekend warrior” mentality that purportedly serves as Wild Hogs’ narrative lynchpin, and the film certainly won’t provide memorable laughs that will stick with you much beyond the day of viewing.
Still, through pure contrast of character, some nice contributions from bit players, a very few unexpected avenues of brief exploration and a couple of comedic showcases which allow Martin Lawrence and Tim Allen to flaunt their demonstrative, small screen-fed personas, Wild Hogs plays as a pleasingly broad diversion, provided one’s level of anticipation is properly adjusted downward.
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Touchstone Pictures
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A shaggy dog of a dentist
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The story centers on a group of suburbanite pals and amateur motorcycle enthusiasts who slowly come around to the idea of hitting the highway in their leather and chrome. Dentist Doug (Allen) can’t relate to his pre-teen son, and finds his myriad dietary restrictions symbolic of a stripped-down manhood. Family man and aspirant author Bobby (Lawrence) is henpecked by his wife into returning to a job he hates, as an emergency plumber. Soon to be divorced, an agitated Woody (John Travolta, conveying bravado through loudness) has lost his perfect white collar job and curvaceous wife, but can’t bring himself to tell his friends. Then there’s Dudley (William H. Macy, sporting goggles and black leather in a fashion that summons unpleasant memories of Mystery Men), the only single one of the bunch, an earnest computer programmer who has trouble talking to women.
Together these working men decide to hit the open highway for an unplanned road trip. Two need no permission slip, and while Doug’s wife Kelly (Jill Hennessy) encourages the journey, Bobby tells his wife Karen (Tichina Arnold) he’s going to a plumbing conference in Cleveland.
After some minor misadventures, the group stumbles across a dusty, out-of-the-way bar where Jack (Ray Liotta, exercising his patented crazy-guy aggressive laugh), the leader of roughneck gang of bikers known as the Del Fuegos, makes things rough, and lays claim to Dudley’s 1,200cc Sportster. At first the guys slink off, but Woody reverts course, takes the bike back and sabotages the Del Fuegos’ rides — telling his friends, of course, that he talked down the burly group of bullies. When our four far-from-intrepid riders-on-the-norm subsequently run out of gas, they hole up in a small town where Dudley develops a crush on diner owner Maggie (Marisa Tomei). The Del Fuegos, meanwhile, have revenge on their minds.
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Touchstone Pictures
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He stays well south of Fargo
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While scrupulously shooting around the fleshy, well-fed torsos of most of his stars (most apparent in a skinny-dipping scene), director Walt Becker (National Lampoon’s Van Wilder) does find plenty of screen time for fleshy forearms and male butt shots. This feeds the bizarrely high, slightly unnerving quotient of homophobic gay jokes in Brad Copeland’s script, in which a random motorcycle cop (Scrubs’ John C. McGinley) attempts to horn in on the quartet’s bonhomie and, later, one of the Del Fuegos responds in the affirmative when asked if anyone has “that pre-rape feeling.”
Naturally, driven as it is by broad, slapstick tone, Wild Hogs is what one might call a comedy of inconsequentiality. Tumbles and bouts with bulls are brushed off, and the Del Fuegos have to be seen as a sort of playground menace — threatening bullies and louts who do damage to property and limb, but without any truly lasting effects. That informs the tone of the movie throughout, and dents the impact of the final confrontation.
What works in Wild Hogs, to the degree that it does, flows mostly from the disparate strengths of its cast. Fans of Allen’s work on Home Improvement get one of his grunting, guys’ guy scenes; Lawrence, meanwhile, engages in a theatrical, mustard-and-ketchup-soaked putdown of a pair of Del Fuego scouts, believing they’ve already been put in their place by Travolta’s Woody. Macy, meanwhile, is the naïve but sweet ballast to all of this; he gives the film its only real trace of recognizable humanity, and shares a pitch-perfect scene of flirtation with Tomei that almost gives you a glimpse of another film centering only on him. A post-credit sequence involving a popular ABC-TV program also manages to score some left field laughs.
Most of the rest of the movie’s set pieces, though — slapping a bull’s ass for thrills, the aforementioned introduction of Dudley through his laptop-destroying public shaming, the guys being assaulted by poop and birds on their cycles — come off as lowest-common-denominator fodder. But perhaps that’s why the movie is called Wild Hogs. Anyone, after all, can slap on some black leather and affect a lifestyle. And for even less money, anyone can vicariously live out that thrill through of-the-moment entertainment.
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