Screenhead

As with most sane, rational people, I was somewhat surprised to learn that not only was Wild Hogs the number one movie this weekend, but it earned an absurd $38 million as well. My first instinct was to take to the streets, rallying and protesting alongside the millions of other disbelievers until Buena Vista Pictures came clean with the real numbers. But when I went into the garage to get a stick to mount my sign on, I was disappointed to see that no such crowd had materialized. There were no reports of a sudden explosion in meth usage either. I was perplexed, and left with no other option but to see the film myself.

What I saw was… bland. Seriously, this movie puts tofu to shame. Also, it really doesn’t care for the whole “gay” thing. The entire first half hour is little more than jokes about heterosexual men getting too close and/or naked for one another’s comfort, broken up by the odd bit of exposition. And the story it sets up is this: John Travolta joins up with the same character Tim Allen plays in every Tim Allen movie, the same character Martin Lawrence plays in every (PG-13) Martin Lawrence movie, and a doofus played by William H. Macy (Bill, how could you?) to go on a cross-country road trip. Zaniness and hijinx ensue. We know that it’s zany and wacky, because the soundtrack is filled with that light, peppy “look how wacky we are” music, at least between classic rock songs.

This isn’t rocket science: Take four archetypal characters (middle-aged losers/part-time motorcycle enthusiasts), give them a single defining characteristic (hen-pecked, just lost everything, can’t get no respect, complete doofus), send them on a quest/roadtrip, have each of them do something spectacularly stupid (like piss off a bunch of real bikers), build to a ridiculously unrealistic stand-off, add some poop jokes and a dash of homophobia, and you’ve got a box office winner. Apparently.

The movie is very much in the Meet the Parents vein, in that you can see the set-ups a mile away, and as a result none of the payoffs are terrifically surprising. Much like that movie, the players all have terrific potential, but they never manage to build to anything cohesive. That could be a function of the editing: It seemed fairly obvious to me that there was at least a half hour of film on the cutting room floor – we never find out what exactly Travolta’s character does, and Macy’s dialogue with love interest Marisa Tomei hints at her having some sort of backstory. Whatever the reason, the jokes never quite build, and the characters behave unbelievably erratically. Something’s missing. Like, I don’t know, originality and cohesiveness.

And yet, people saw it in droves. Perhaps it’s the same audience that made a big hit out of Talladega Nights, another movie that never quite gelled either. Perhaps the biker gimmick won people over, just as Talladega’s NASCAR bit did. Or maybe the audience’s standards just aren’t that high. I suppose that’s a more pleasant prospect than the audience themselves being high.

But only just slightly.