[REVIEW] Wild Hogs (2007) Is Actually A Funny Movie

By The_Night_Rider on March 4, 2015@manlymovie

Runtime: 100 Mins

Rated: PG-13

What To Expect: A movie that somehow defies the odds, makes you laugh

Years back when Blu Ray first came out, I got this movie through the mail when I was using one of those postal rental services. I had ran out of things to rent, and somehow this ended up on the list as filler. By all accounts, it looked (and looks) like shit. It has ‘autumn years’ John Travolta – i.e. everything he appears in is shit. It has Tim Allen, a second rate John Travolta, and it has Martin Lawrence, a third-rate Eddie Murphy. And it’s also a Disney movie, if I recall. It looks like one of those shitty, soft-assed sappy comedies that premier on TV at 1pm at Christmas Day. It looks that way, but this motherfucker is a dark horse. A sleeper. It’s one of those movies where if someone is in the room, I work an excuse in to get it on screen, or if it comes on TV, I have to watch till the end. It shouldn’t work, but it just does.

Travolta, Allen, Macy and Lawrence are in well-timed mid life crises’. They deal with it by going on a road trip across the USA on their pristine, hardly used bikes. The idea is to ditch the women and cellphones and let the road clear their minds. These are four family men, from the suburbs, playing biker-gang in their spare time. They are the ‘Wild Hogs’. Then they run into and fall afoul of the real deal – a gang of biker thugs led by manly man Ray Liotta. While being chased up and down highways by Liotta and Co. for being ‘fake’, not to mention blowing up Liotta’s shack/bar, they are also stalked by a gay biker-cop (John C. McGinley) who assumes they are all gay, and wants in on the action. Right from the off in this movie, you can ‘sense’ that it’s going to be good because the actors are clearly having a ball, not phoning it in like a typical caper movie.

The humor in this movie is fucking crude but it is elevated hugely by perfect casting. Take Macy, the guy is practically playing Ned Flanders here. So.. Ned Flanders walks into the roughest biker bar imaginable expecting a solidarity bikers welcome. Liotta indulges the noobs before losing patience. His interactions with Liotta’s thug are hilarious, the dialogue is custom-tailored trolling (“So you’re a biker gang, huh?” … “Yep! Yepperrooni!”). This is also probably the first time in the history of Martin Lawrence movies, that Martin Lawrence himself has actually made me laugh. Well done Martin, you got there in the end. Everyone is on form here. It could’ve been better though, if this thing was Rated-R it would’ve been an all time classic. Top it off: It’s probably the best Blu Ray transfer I’ve ever seen, even today. The cinematography and 1080p picture are just staggering.

You know what? This film is twice as funny as ‘The Hangover’, and we won’t see a sequel. They canned a sequel to this. Good going, studio, you drop turds all over the place but when you finally do get it right, you fuck it up.