Director: Walt Becker, 12A, 100min
Stars: John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen, William H. Macy

On general release

Harley-Davidson product placement and male-menopause wisecrackery feature in a road comedy that turns the fine character actor Macy into a living crash-test dummy. He plays a computer geek who joins three friends — a henpecked writer-plumber (Lawrence, above left with Allen and Travolta), a stuck-in-a-rut dentist (Allen) and a broke businessman (Travolta) — on a bike trip from Cincinatti to California to banish their middle-aged suburban blues.

BACKGROUND

• Wild Hogs

• These hogs are bores

• Hell's Angels to Dads Army: How Harleys lost their street cred

Midlife crisis averted

William H. Macy used to fear he’d be famous only for Fargo. Suddenly he’s busier than ever, he tells Kevin Maher

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

This is a Disneyfied makeover of Easy Rider by way of City Slickers. Our heroes stop for pee-breaks every few miles. Their tents burn down. Macy falls off his bike a few times. A bird flies into Travolta’s face. And there are lots of jokes about any suggestion that they might be gay. Then they fall foul of real bikers led by Ray Liotta (Christopher Walken was presumably unavailable) and hide out in a quaint New Mexico town, where Macy hooks up with the local café owner (Marisa Tomei).

As you can tell, the film isn’t big on subtlety — a showdown in the movie prompts ELO’s Showdown on the soundtrack. One keeps waiting for an inevitable cameo from a 1960s biker icon — and Peter Fonda duly delivers. But Allen looks bored, Lawrence seems to be marking time until Big Momma’s House 3 and Travolta sometimes seems so disengaged you can almost hear his personal jet idling just out of shot. The only real thing they bring to their roles are the paunches underneath their leather jackets.

Macy manages to bring such sweetness to his character that his predictable pratfalls seem less irritating. But in the end this tends to shoehorn everybody into lame gags about bodily waste, property damage and haphazard homoeroticism that can withstand a 12A rating. At least they didn’t use Born to be Wild.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010