Paul Hogan

  • The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020)

    The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) You have to have some sympathy for entertainers who, after a lifetime of hard work, personal development and multiple projects, still end up recognized for one single thing. Paul Hogan may have had quite a varied career in Australia, but his North American legacy will forever remain playing “Crocodile” Dundee, and so The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee ends up being a meta-Hollywood comedy that sees the 80-year-old wrestle with his unescapable legacy. Hogan was old back in 2001 with the third Dundee film — he’s even older here and looks like it. Perhaps the film’s best moments are allowing a few fellow senior citizen comedians to poke fun at the passing of fame by playing “themselves” — John Cleese shows up as a maniacal ride-share driver to make ends meet; Chevy Chase as an egomaniac; Wayne Knight as a tap-dancing singer; and Olivia Newton-John as something like window dressing. Hogan’s character himself is quite unlike his own best-known character — mild, gaffe-prone, and trying to retire peacefully even as others try to bring him back, often speaking from a position of ignorance. Much of the film’s structure is cyclical, with Hogan exploring the world of 2021 and committing a series of faux pas that land him on the news as the worst person ever. That gets old quickly (especially when the gags are stretched-out and not all that funny in the first place), even as other moments in the film work relatively well. I did like Cleese’s role and some of the comical flourishes poking fun at modern Hollywood. This being said, there is something a bit awkward about a film built around an older man’s lack of comfort in the world — a film about retirement in which Hogan shows up with his first starring role in a decade. I smirked a few times at The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee and it ranks as one of the weirdest legacy sequels so far, so it’s not all that bad — but there are plenty of missed opportunities along the way for a more incisive take on aging stars and whether they should retire once and for all.

  • Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001)

    Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.]

  • “Crocodile” Dundee II (1988)

    “Crocodile” Dundee II (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Crocodile Dundee (1986)

    Crocodile Dundee (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2017) There’s no doubt that Crocodile Dundee has become a minor reference in the history of US/Australian relations, and part of it has to do with the utter simplicity of seeing a rough Australian bushman being thrust in mid-eighties Manhattan. While the film is rather dull in its first act, it finally clicks once the outback meets the streets of New York. The classic gags (“That’s a knife”) come from this middle section of the film, once past the bush prologue and before the film gets bogged down in an unconvincing romance. (This is one of those movies where, despite the happy ending, you basically give them six months together.) What doesn’t work so well is the simplistic plot—once you’re past the jokes, there simply isn’t much left in the movie. Worse yet is some of the dated humour (the transsexual jokes wouldn’t be tolerated nowadays.) and the agonizing pacing of the last sequence. While I’m happy I finally saw the movie that everyone talked about thirty years ago (echoed in pop culture since then), I don’t think Crocodile Dundee has aged well at all.