WILD HOGS

[KiwiCoromandel]

WILD HOGS is a comedy about four men in their 50s, weekend bikers from Cincinnati, taking their Harleys out on a road trip. The four are played by John Travolta, William Macy, Martin Lawrence and Tim Allen.

That cast has to be good for a few laughs, you would think, even if Allen hasn't seen a funny script since last century, and Lawrence never has. (OK, some people find them both hilarious; I don't.) And yes, there are some sparks of humour in this script - just not enough to kick over a postman's Honda, let alone a great big beast of a Harley.

Films like these are built for speed, not comfort. The big name cast is there to drag in an audience for the opening weekend, so the picture makes its money before word gets out. A good trailer will add $20 million for the opening weekend, then the film is gone like the wind. Everyone who made it has already been well paid, including the five producers. (What did they do, I wonder, to make the film better?) The only ones left feeling slightly soiled and disrespected are the ticket buyers, in whom hope never dies.

I don't believe it necessarily started out like this. Everyone wants to make a funny movie when they sign on; the four leads probably thought it would be fun to ride big bikes across New Mexico for a few weeks. And the support cast includes Ray Liotta and Marisa Tomei. Something in the script must have been reading as funny, at some point.

I suspect that that initial script went through some changes on set. When you sign actors of this magnitude, you may also get four people who think they are writers and directors. And when the real director is younger, with only two features to his name ( Van Wilder, Buying the Cow), neither of which had big stars, he's going to have trouble keeping the big guns in line. I could be wrong, but it feels like a movie where no one was in charge.

There's also the problem that the comedy is pitched at a mental age of about eight, as in the early scene where Woody (Travolta) is yelling down the phone at a business associate, screaming about honouring a contract. He rushes out his front door, and we realise he's been haggling over $10 with the kid who's raking his leaves.

Woody is the most "successful" of the four, except that we know he's broke and his wife, an international model, has left him. Doug (Allen) is a meek dentist, Bobby (Lawrence) is a hen-pecked plumber and Dudley (Macy) is a computer geek who has never had a proper girlfriend. They call themselves the Wild Hogs (hogs being slang for a Harley), but Woody has it right when he challenges them to do a real road trip, rather than a Saturday morning run to the local diner. "We're not Wild Hogs, more like wild lambs."

Soon they head out on the highway, looking for adventure, as the song says, but they run into a new version of the cast of The Wild One, with Liotta in the Brando role. Jack (Liotta) hates yuppie bikers and declares war. The four lambs hole up in a picturesque village, where Maggie (Tomei) runs the cafe. The film then turns into an update of The Magnificent Seven, except they're three short, and the Mexican bandidos are a biker gang called the Del Fuegos.

The idea had promise and such a great cast should have worked. All it needed was a comic intelligence in control, preferably someone like Mel Brooks, who could turn it into gleeful mayhem. Instead, it has the most obvious jokes, constructed with painful labour. The small town is having a hot chilli festival; how long before one of the four gets to do a "speechless with chilli" kind of act? Oh boy, didn't see that coming!

I was hoping the Del Fuegos would win.

source:AP

image:AP:John Travolta, William H. Macy and Tim Allen in WILD HOGS.