Review

Wild Hogs
Director: Walt Becker
Writer: Brad Copeland
Cast: Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Ray Liotta
Genre: Comedy
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 99 mins
Tagline: Four guys from the suburbs hit the road... and the road hit back.

Wild Hogs is a tepid male menopause riff à la City Slickers that substitutes the highway for the open plain: call it Easy Riders, Raging Bullshit.
The four horsemen of this cinematic apocalypse are Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence, John Travolta and William H Macy, who are meant to be playing lifelong pals but haven’t the faintest sniff of chemistry between them. Say what you will about City Slickers, but at least Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern and the late Bruno Kirby made eye contact now and again.
The set up is as perfunctory as it gets: the leads are all suffering from some manner of mid-life crisis and resolve to sow their mild oats with a cross-country road trip.
They run afoul of some mean bikers (headed up by Ray Liotta, whose torrid pace of late suggests either unbridled joy in his craft or severe gambling debts) and end up re-asserting their waning machismo. The rest of the screen time is devoted to wide-angle shots of the actors and their stunt doubles atop their bikes while hockey-arena anthems blare on the soundtrack.
That amid discomfiting, superficially good-natured homophobia — eg John C McGinley’s cameo as a lascivious patrolman who menaces our heroes like some mincing variant on The Hitcher.
Oh yeah, and people also fall off their bikes a lot, sometimes hitting the ground, sometimes tumbling into other things. Slapstick violence + gay panic = family comedy gold!
— Adam Nayman