Wild Hogs: No Classic but Much Better Than Critics Say

On a cold, blustery Sunday afternoon in Bluffton, Ohio, (yes the one that is home to the tragic Bluffton University baseball team saga), my son and I were restless sitting around the Comfort Inn while my wife was visiting her sister at Lima Memorial Hospital.

As much as I like college basketball and it's annual March Madness Tournament, we had already watched one game that day, and with a hyper 10 year old cooped up in a motel room, even a nice one, I decided to take the short trip over to the small one screen Shannon Theatre in downtown Bluffton.

We had directions, but still overlooked it the first time around. I spied a small sign and noticed people filing in, so we walked across the street and spotted the poster for Wild Hogs, which we had already heard was playing. I had seen the trailers and it seemed like it might be funny, so in we went. The tickets were a remarkable $3 each for the matinee. We even got a big tub of popcorn and 2 large drinks for a total outlay of $10 including the tickets, almost unheard of these days.

Anyway, about the show. The premise is that 4 middle-aged men, living in Cincinnati or the suburbs of the Queen City, decide to take a vacation from their everyday, humdrum lives to ride their Harleys across the country to the Pacific Coast.

Doug played by Tim Allen is a boring dentist (is that redundant?) whose wife and son are constantly watching his cholesterol count and calory intake.

Bobby (Martin Lawrence) is a plumber taking a 1 year hiatus to write a book, which most of us can relate to, until his domineering wife gets his old job back for him.

Dudley (William H. Macy) is a nerdy computer programmer (with a name like Dudley, what are the odds?) who is deathly afraid to talk to women.

Lastly, there is Woody (John Travolta) who has the sort of life the others wish they had. Super Model wife, mansion, etc. Or so it seems.

The four are old college buddies who get together regularly, mainly to ride their bikes and reminisce about their younger days. they have become the sort of guys who buy cereal for the fiber content instead of the toy inside. At 51, I can relate in some ways.

Woody comes up with the idea for the trip, but the others take some convincing. Especially the hen-pecked Bobby, who eventually tells his wife he's going to a "toilet bowl convention" in Cleveland.

Having known guys who had some sort of mid-life crisis, the premise is not that unlikely. I've known men who were regular guys, even yuppie types, who grew a ponytail, started wearing leather pants, getting tattoos and generally providing co-workers with plenty of joke material with all that and riding a motorcycle. Not that I would ever joke about such things. You would think that riding on that hard seat would be hard on the ol' prostate, but back to the movie.

The quartet take off on their adventure and much to my surprise, the song Born To Be Wild is nowhere on the soundtrack. That has to be a first for a biker flick since the late 60's. They brought tents and camping gear, which , of course get destroyed almost immediately. There is a scene a little like the banned Snickers ad from Super Bowl Sunday.

One of the main criticisms of the film is that is is homophobic. I don't agree, but it does seem a little heavy on the gay jokes throughout the movie, especially a kareoke singer played by Kyle Gass, at a carnival in New Mexico. The first couple of scenes were funny, particularly when he sang "don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me", but overall, it got too repetitive after 3 or 4 times.

Probably the funniest scene in the movie is the skinny dipping scene in which a family happens along to share the swimming hole with the biker-"wannabes". The father, while looking for crawdads under water discovers something he hadn't bargained for. There's also a funny scene in which the robo-nerd Dudley hangs a plastic bag of solid human waste from a tree, rather than bury it. "I can't put plastic in the Earth" Dudley intones.

Of course, in any movie of this genre, you must have cartoonish bad guys. Men who are so vile, so obnoxious and so mean-spirited, they ought to run for office. Maybe even President. They might as well, everyone else is.

Ray Liotta is the leader of the Del Fuegos, a Hell's Angels-like biker gang, and of course, they hate wannabes... like the Wild Hogs, who stumble into the Del Fuegos bar like they were looking for Norm, Woody and Sam. Rather than make a scene (and get their butts kicked), the Wild Hogs take a Del Fuegos trade proposal that, on the surface seems like a good deal. In the immortal words of Boy George, "everything's not what it seems" and those words prove true once again. The Hogs amble on down the road before Woody decides to go back and "renegotiate". He comes back with Dudley's bike, telling his comrades that he threatened legal action.

Without giving away too much, let's just say that sparks flew in the meeting, leaving Liotta's character, Jack, fuming and the Del Fuegos looking for revenge. And the Del Fuegos are not the sort of guys who believe that living well is the best revenge.

The Wild Hogs hole up in a small town in New Mexico, with a Sheriff who's afraid of guns and his doofus deputies, twins Buck and Earl Dooble, one who can't hear out of his right ear. The town is terrified of the Wild Hogs at first, due to previous experiences with a certain biker gang. Maggie's Diner is the most popular restaurant, with Marisa Tomei as Maggie, who immediately takes a shine to the nerdy Dudley. After much encouragement from his mates, Dudley finally gets up the nerve to do what he hasn't done in years, ask a woman for a date.

The ending is a little predictable, at least until a surprise appearance by a certain famous actor. The previously wimpy Wild Hogs act manly, banding together after bickering throughout the film, with spines stiffened. I'll let you discover the rest for yourself.

The film is rated PG-13 for some mild swearing and adult situations and runs 1 hour 39 minutes. There are cameos by John C. McGinley of Scrubs, Kyle Gass, Steve Landesburg, Ty Pennington and the aforementioned famous actor as the real leader of the Del Fuegos. The film won't win any awards, is hardly a classic, but it is funny and a pleasant diversion, especially if your'e a middle aged man dealing with the same sort of issues as the Wild Hogs. I'm not much on motorcycle riding, my mind wanders too much, but it would be nice to just get out on the open road and travel from time to time and therein lies much of the appeal of this movie.