The Travolta/Cage Project #82 Wild Hogs (2006)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
It’s a testament to the soul-crushingly awful nature of John Travolta’s mid-to-late period work that over the course of this wonderfully masochistic project I continually find myself wishing that I was re-watching Battlefield Earth rather than whatever abomination I was forced to watch for this column and the Travolta/Cage podcast.
Suffering mightily through the deplorable likes of Be Cool, Lonely Hearts and A Love Song for Bobby Long didn’t just make me nostalgic for classics like Carrie, Blow Out, Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. These turkeys are so depressingly bad that they make me pine for a Travolta movie that is excruciatingly awful and one of the most notorious flops in film history yet possesses a personality and sense of life that makes it infinitely superior to the many, many movies Travolta has made that are somehow even worse.
I wouldn’t just rather re-watch Battlefield Earth than endure the unGodly torment of watching Wild Hogs a third time: I would rather have a private Battlefield Earth film festival where I watched the L. Ron Hubbard flop five times in a row than subject myself to Wild Hogs a single more time.
I have now seen and written about Wild Hogs twice. That’s it, universe! Unless John Travolta hires me to ghost-write his autobiography, there is no way in hell I am ever going to subject myself to that fucking movie again.
We’re not even close to finished with the Travolta half of Travolta/Cage and Travolta/Cage and bone-deep spiritual and emotional exhaustion has nevertheless kicked in hardcore. This isn’t a merry jaunt through some silly, sub-par films: it’s a grim death march that I may not survive with my soul, spirit and sanity intact.
That might seem hyperbolic but have you seen Wild Hogs? I mean, have you seen it? It made A QUARTER BILLION DOLLARS AT THE BOX OFFICE, which says something deeply incriminating about the intelligence and judgment of the American people and moviegoing public but it also suggests that at least some of you caught snatches of it on basic cable.
In Wild Hogs, John Travolta, Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence play loathsome pieces of shit who hate themselves, life and women, if not necessarily in that order.
William H. Macy’s proud Poindexter Dudley is the only member of the titular quartet who does not hate himself, or women or life. He’s also the only member of the squad who is wholly comfortable in his sexuality and masculinity.
Macy steals the film but that’s a misdemeanor at most.
Travolta plays Woody, a hotshot lawyer who is slick and confident on the outside but dead inside. Woody’s defining characteristic might just be his horror at the prospect of anyone thinking that he’s gay.
As I wrote in my piece about Wild Hogs for The Dissolve that I will now reference extensively because fuck this movie, “after crashing his bike early in the film, Dudley rides on the back of Woody’s hog, and Dudley sneaks a long, intense sniff of Woody’s manly musk. Woody is, of course, apoplectic. “If you ever put your head on my shoulder, I’ll throw you into traffic,” he angrily informs Dudley. But when Bobby asks him whether he girlishly smelled his friend’s neck, Dudley rhapsodizes without shame about how much he loves his friend’s cologne, like a teenaged girl in the first blush of puppy love. Later, at a swimming hole, Dudley dives in bare-ass naked because he views the human body as a beautiful gift from God, and not something gross and gay, as Travolta’s character does. His friends follow suit, but Woody only disrobes with the caveat, “I will get naked with my gay friends, and if any of them look at my junk, I will kill them.”
Later, as I wrote in my piece from The Dissolve, “When the four Hogs are forced by circumstances, and the free-floating stupidity of the script to sleep out at night on a single filthy mattress in a field, a police officer played by the great John C. McGinley overhears them moaning things like, “Boy, my ass is sore,” “It’s Woody’s fault for riding us so hard yesterday. The human body isn’t meant to straddle something for that long,” and, “Anybody want to explain to me why I’m in the dirt, when I got sore jaws from three hours of blowing?”
But it isn’t all gay panic jokes and sour misanthropy. It’s only 40 percent gay panic jokes and sour misanthropy. The rest of the plot involves the Wild Hogs squaring off against a real motorcycle gang called The Del Fuegos who do not appreciate these meek suburban posers appropriating their lifestyle.
In a performance that truly embodies the concept of joylessly grinding it out for a paycheck, Ray Liotta plays the leader of the Del Fuegos as a macho, one-dimensional asshole who is nevertheless only slightly less likable than the Wild Hogs.
Because he is an utter monster, Woody cuts the gas lines on the Del Fuegos’ bikes, then lies to his fellow Wild Hogs and insists that the angry bikers won’t even think about doing anything to them because of his legal wizardry.
This leads to an absolutely agonizing set-piece where Lawrence’s character, who is otherwise utterly emasculated by his job as a plumber and his wife making more than him, reclaims his lost manhood by tossing drinks in the faces of Del Fuegos before spraying them ketchup and mustard as if he was creating a psychotic fast food version of a Jackson Pollack painting before climactically kneeing them in the testicles.
It’s just one interminable, joyless, laugh-less, loathsome slapstick set-piece after another, executed artlessly by people who seem to hate their roles as much as their characters hate their lives.
FUCK Wild Hogs. Fuck it all to hell. I’m sorry if that’s not eloquent or professional but I want to express the intensity and purity of my hatred for this film, which really is the goddamn worst, an absolute nadir.
Let’s see if I feel the same way after experiencing Old Dogs in the terrifyingly near future, with which Wild Hogs shares a star, a director and an almost inconceivable awfulness.
Deep into my second and FINAL viewing of Wild Hogs I concocted what might be considered a fan theory if I was not, in fact, the farthest thing from a fan of the movie. I’m more of a hater, really.
In my mind I decided that the reason why Woody wants his buddies to ride with him to California is because he wants them to commit suicide with him by climactically driving their motorcycles into the ocean to watery deaths.
Woody has nothing left to live for. His entire scuzzy existence is wrapped up in being successful, rich and married to a supermodel. But as the movie opens he’s no longer rich, successful or married to a supermodel.
The world seemingly has nothing left to offer this charmless, awful man but decay and death. Why not end it all in the company of people who have somehow tolerated you for decades despite your dreadful personality?
Wild Hogs is so sad, sour and joyless that it begs to be put out of its misery. It works better as a secret tragedy than as a comedy in part because it could not represent a sadder or less successful attempt at humor.
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