Going whole hog

Four buddies hit by middle-age crisis undertake a wild road trip

In the comedy Wild Hogs, Tim Allen, John Travolta, William H. Macy and Martin Lawrence play weekend warrior buddies from Cincinnati who jump on their Harleys and take a road trip to the Pacific in hopes of pepping up their humdrum suburban lives.

Although filled with slapstick and more than a few off-colour jokes, the movie's underlying theme is how many baby boomers feel that they have compromised their values while losing the idealism of their youth.

"We thought we could change the world and, to be fair, we did change the world,'' said Macy. "We stopped the war. We got rid of the president and we changed everything. But life overtook us. And there are hundreds of thousands of Harley riders who are trying to regain that feeling.''

"The revolutionary ... becomes the establishment,'' said Allen.

"We would have burned down a stage had it been sponsored by a beverage company. The new generation of musicians, the first thing they do is attach themselves to the corporation. We were anti-establishment, and we became a bigger more powerful establishment. We became what we hated.''

In the film Allen's Doug is happily married with a young son but is bored with his mundane job as a dentist; Travolta's fast-talking Woody has lost his swimsuit model wife, his fortune and his job; Macy's Dudley is a computer nerd who is too shy to talk to women; and Lawrence's Bobby is a henpecked plumber.

Director Walt Becker - who at 38 is too young to be a true boomer - said that every generation goes through crisis points.

"I had one after college. I just took a year and a half off to travel and thought, What do I want to do in my life? I think what was neat about the movie is that the (characters) are asking themselves that question: Where is my life going and should I make a change?''

All three actors, as well as Becker, had a history with motorcycles. "I financed my college education by buying and selling Harleys with my father,'' said Becker.

Travolta has been riding motorcycles since he was a struggling young actor in Los Angeles in the early 1970s.
Just like Travolta, Macy tooled around Los Angeles on a motorcycle in the 1970s.

But because he was rusty and had never ridden a Harley, Macy took lessons from the film's stunt coordinator, Jack Gill. It was love at first sight for Macy and his machine.