Wild Hogs

The other night, in between sending and receiving movies from Netflix we ended up with the kids in the living room with us for a few minutes and watched this movie.

From 2007 the movie had plenty of star power but did not receive good reviews. Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence and William Macy star as four middle aged friends who enjoy riding motorcycles together. As middle age settles heavily on them, boring jobs, demanding spouses, and realizing that the lives they have are not what they expected in their younger days they decide that they must do something to break out. In short they have become responsible, and thus boring, adults.

Woody, played by Travolta, urges them to take a cross country motorcycle trip. All agree and off they go. William H Macy plays Dudley, a computer programmer, and nerd of the group. Tim Allen is a dentist and Martin Lawrence a salesman whose wife has him on a very short leash.

The movie is not great. A few moments are funny, Macy is probably the actor with the strongest performance, playing against his normal type, and he does a good job. This movie is a far cry from The Cooler or Fargo.

Ray Liotta plays the leader of a real motorcycle gang who takes a strong exception to what he deems are pretenders. A funny scene is when he guesses and then criticizes the lifestyles that the Wild Hogs are stepping away from and when Dudley, Macy's character, amazed at his accuracy asks him " what color am I thinking of?" As I said the movie has it's moments.

Marissa Tomei plays a waitress who becomes a love interest of Dudley. Travolta and Allen are a bit muted in this movie, Lawrence has a few moments of over the top acting but Macy really is the strongest. Tomei is generally underrated, and enjoyable in this as well.

The reviews in some cases were pretty nasty. I surely did not think it was that bad. It was what it was, cute in some places, with some broad farce, but generally entertaining.

A special nod should go to Peter Fonda who has a small part in the movie as, what else, a legendary motorcycle figure. If your movie is about motorcycles and you get Peter Fonda in it cannot be all bad.