The Wild Hogs (**1/2)

? Four middle-aged pals (Martin Lawrence, John Travolta, Tim Allen, William H. Macy) try to recapture old times, and some version of their manhood, by taking off on an impromptu motorcycle trip.
+ Really the only thing to recommend this movie is a few laughs. I chuckled, for example, when the four guys go skinny dipping in a pond and are then embarrassed when a family of four decides to join them. The borderline campy stuff involving the Hogs’ encounters with a nasty biker gang also had its moments. Macy, playing the meekest of this not-so-wild quartet, not surprisingly gives the best performance. Lawrence’s dialogue is refreshingly free of the tiresome racial humor he typically spouts in his starring roles.
- There’s little to fall back on when the jokes don’t work, which is about half the time. (Come on, a computer keyboard does not smoke when you spill liquid on it.) The characters are seriously one-dimensional (I barely remember Tim Allen’s at all) and secondary to the formulaic plot, which in turn is secondary to sight gags and other humor revolving around the Hogs’ attempts to assert their masculinity. The theme of trying to recapture their youth is redundant, since each of the men is notably infantile. (Even the women they’re paired with are a decade or more younger.) When these four cowardly lions predictably get their courage back via a grand showdown with the biker gang, it could not be less believable. For a middle-aged guy like me, this kind of killed the fantasy.
= **1/2 In a season of truly bad comedies, the unwavering mediocrity here stands out.

IMDB link

reviewed 3/1/07