Getting their midlife motors running

Male-menopause wisecrackery with heavy-duty Harley-Davidson product placement, Wild Hogs stars Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy and John Travolta as weekend biker buddies who chuck their dull suburban lives - for a week, anyway - to ride their glistening chrome machines into the sunset.

"Did you ever wake up one day and wonder what happened to your life?" wonders Doug (Allen), a Cincinnati dentist with a wife, a kid, and a creeping sense of midlife ennui.

Yeah, and did you ever go to a high-concept Hollywood movie and wonder what happened to your 99 minutes?

Truth be told, Wild Hogs, directed by Walt Becker, the great auteur behind National Lampoon's Van Wilder, isn't as jaw-droppingly awful as its trailers suggest.

Travolta, scrunching his eyes into little slits and oozing, at key moments, amusing amounts of apoplectic angst, rediscovers some of his comic chops as Woody Stevens, the guy the other three admire. He's a slick, successful businessman, wed to a swimsuit model, living in a big, cool house. But as the Hogs get ready to roll, Woody is coming to grips with a painful truth: His life is a sham.

Lawrence's character, Bobby Davis, is a plumber who dreams of writing novels, and who lives with a loving but overbearing wife. Macy plays Dudley Frank, a computer programmer. He's single, hangs out in cafes, and stammers helplessly in the company of attractive women.

Invoking The Wild Bunch, and, dubiously, Deliverance, the foursome decide to mount up and head West, their Wild Hogs logos emblazoned on the back of their leather motorcycle jackets. They even leave the helmets at home.

Gay jokes - and a buff, admiring Highway Patrol motorcycle officer - ensue. There are a lot of gay jokes, of the same mocking macho tenor as that Snickers ad shown during the Super Bowl.

And then the Hogs pull into a real biker bar, a roadside dive populated by a gang of burly, bearded, tattooed dudes known collectively as the Del Fuegos. Ray Liotta, sneering his sinister sneer, is Jack, the leader of the pack, and he doesn't like these paunchy middle-aged amateurs steppin' on his turf.

The four Hogs are dead meat in the eyes of Jack and his gang - especially after the whole bar goes up in flames. So, when the four friends stop at a sleepy little town for the night - a sleepy little town with a chili festival and a friendly diner proprietor (Marisa Tomei) who seems taken by the geeky, bumbling Dudley - it's not long before the Del Fuegos show up, too.

Allen and Lawrence (who gets his own personal allotment of black jokes) can do this stuff in their sleep, and, in fact, at times it seems they are. Macy brings an unabashed goofiness to the proceedings that helps, though doesn't entirely succeed, in camouflaging the cliche-rich script.

Wild Hogs ends with a cameo by one of the stars of another guys-hit-the-blacktop-lookin'-for-freedom flick. That would be Easy Rider, the landmark 1969 counterculture road movie. Is Peter Fonda's appearance in Wild Hogs a sell-out?

Nah, there are way too many years between Easy Rider and Wild Hogs for that, and, anyway, he's as much a candidate for male hormone replacement therapy as the next guy.

Produced by Mike Tollin, Brian Robbins and Todd Lieberman, directed by Walt Becker, written by Brad Copeland, photography by Robbie Greenberg, music by Teddy Castellucci, distributed by Touchstone Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 39 mins.

Doug Madsen...................... Tim Allen

Woody Stevens. . . John Travolta

Bobby Davis. . . Martin Lawrence

Dudley Frank............ William H. Macy

Maggie. . . Marisa Tomei

Parent's guide: PG-13 (profanity, cartoon violence, adult themes)

Playing at: area theaters

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