‘Wild Hogs’ zooms on despite critics

Though critics gave “Wild Hogs” (Touchstone, $30) an almost unanimous thumbs-down, audiences couldn’t get enough of the comedy about four middle-age weekend motorcycle warriors -- John Travolta, Tim Allen, William H. Macy and Martin Lawrence -- who decide to hit the open road. Along the way, they anger an overage motorcycle gang led by Ray Liotta and are pursued by an amorous gay cop (John C. McGinley).

The extras are perfunctory -- an alternate ending, deleted scenes, production featurettes and a gag reel. The audio commentary with director Walt Becker and writer Brad Copeland is perfectly pleasant; one just wishes they had made a better film.

Far more engrossing is “The Lookout” (Miramax, $30), a nifty thriller that marked the directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Frank (“Get Shorty”). Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a former high school hockey star who suffered a major head trauma in a car crash that left him with memory problems and other physical and mental difficulties. He works as an evening janitor in a bank. One evening at a bar, he takes up with a former student at his high school (Matthew Goode) and a young woman (Isla Fisher). But their friendship is just a ruse to get him to help rob the bank.

Extras include an informative look at brain injuries and effective commentary from Frank and director of photography Alar Kivrlo.

Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling make delicious sparring partners in Gregory Hoblit’s thriller “Fracture” (New Line, $29). Hopkins plays a successful engineer who murders his cheating wife; Gosling plays an ambitious young district attorney about to move to the private sector who meets his match when he is assigned to prosecute Hopkins. The disc comes up lacking in extras, with just a smattering of deleted scenes -- including a less-effective alternate ending.

The most unusual extra of the week is David Lynch’s cooking lesson on the DVD of his latest offbeat film, “Inland Empire” (Rhino, $30). Of course, Lynch’s cooking demonstration, shot in gritty black-and-white, is a far cry from watching Bobby Flay or Mario Batali. There’s something totally surreal about seeing the director in his kitchen preparing one of his favorite foods: quinoa, an edible seed that is close in texture to couscous, to which he adds broccoli. Other extras include more than an hour’s worth of scenes deleted from the three-hour mystery starring Laura Dern, and behind-the-scenes footage of Lynch at work.

Also new

“God Grew Tired of Us” (Sony, $26): Christopher Quinn and Tommy Walker’s exceptional documentary follows three of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan, who in 2001 were among the thousands allowed to leave the refugee camp they had lived in for a decade and relocate to the U.S. Among the extras is heartfelt commentary with Quinn and the three refugees.

“Taxi Driver” (Sony, $25): Terrific new two-disc set of Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1976 character study of a tormented New York taxi driver (Robert DeNiro). The second disc is filled with compelling mini-documentaries on the history of the project, the difficulties in producing the film, an appreciation of Scorsese and conversations with real New York cabdrivers about their experiences in the 1970s.

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susan.king@latimes.com