Crocodile Dundee series

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) While the Crocodile Dundee II seemingly lost its way by going back to the bush, this third instalment does what third instalments do best: go back to the first film, except slightly different. This sequel picks up year after the previous one, featuring Paul Hogan as a crocodile hunter with a son and a not-quite-wife that is suddenly called back to Los Angeles for professional reasons. The only thing that equals Crocodile Dundee in Manhattan is Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, and that’s the cue for the film to milk the kind of fish-out-of-water humour that was missing from the second film. The targets are obvious in la-la-land, and it did strike me at some point not only that this Crocodile Dundee instalment was relying on Hollywood stereotypes that haven’t been true for decades (at least when it comes to having a studio operating in this fashion), but that it was relying both on the audience knowing what the character didn’t as an engine for comedy. It does work – it’s not refined cinema, but there are plenty of comic set-pieces, and Hollywood is enough of a common target that there’s also comfort to be found in the comedy. It could have been worse. Fortunately, the filmmakers had the good sense not to go for a fourth instalment. [September 2020: WRONG! As of 2020, there’s a sort-of-meta fourth instalment, starring Paul Hogan at eighty. It did not get good reviews.]

(In French, On TV, July 2020) If you have a box office hit with a good premise, the best and easiest way to make more money out of it is to deliver another slight variation. Since the main attraction of the Crocodile Dundee series is both Dundee’s character and his fearless reactions at being out of his element, sequel Crocodile Dundee II keeps the character but inverts the structure: While the film begins in Manhattan to show more of Dundee’s antics in the urban jungle, familiar criminal plot mechanics soon bring the action back to the Australian outback, with Dundee playing with deadly opponents on his home turf. The result does feel a bit more Hollywoodish than the original—a bigger budget polishing the rough edges of the original Australian production, with an interest in reaching a bigger, less indulgent audience. The criminal plot is perfunctory, just expansive enough to bring the protagonist in contact with deserving targets all the way home. The point of Crocodile Dundee II remains Dundee’s character, and that does carry over the film. The result is not bad, and neither is the series star Paul Hogan, but it doesn’t reach for sophistication and does feel like much of the same.