Director: John Cornell
Starring: Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, John Meillon, Ernie Dingo, Charles S. Dutton, Luiz Guzman, Gus Mercurio
Crocodile Dundee needs no introduction. Its worldwide popularity and equally beloved and derided status locally are well-documented. It’s a film that does not, by most yardsticks, belong on Down Under Flix, a site dedicated to spotlighting "obscure, forgotten, neglected, and under-appreciated Australian films".
Crocodile Dundee II though … that’s a conversation worth having. Released two years later, it was a hit domestically, albeit not as big as its predecessor, and a huge deal overseas, albeit not as huge as the original. Given their close proximity, one would think that scenes and lines and moments from both instalments would blur together in the haze of nostalgia, as is often the case with popular 80s franchises. But truth be told, I think the moments that stick with audiences are entirely from the first film.
Crocodile Dundee II opens with Mick (Paul Hogan) enjoying life in New York with girlfriend Sue (Linda Kozlowski), having conquered escalators, mastered fishing on New York Harbour, and ingratiated himself with local authorities, postmen, neighbourhood children, and barflies. He’s pining for home though, lacking a clear purpose in the Big Apple. When Sue’s journalist ex-husband witnesses a murder committed by drug dealers in Colombia, he mails the evidence to Sue, and the dealers travel to New York and kidnap her. Mick rescues her, and they head Down Under to Walkabout Creek to confront the criminals on Mick’s home turf. I’d like to say Crocodile Dundee II influenced the makers of Skyfall, but it probably didn’t.
Having said that, this thriller plotting and Mick’s action heroics are key things that differentiate Crocodile Dundee II from its more laidback precursor. The scenes in New York in particular echo urban-set action movies of the 1980s that preceded and followed it: Mick talks a suicidal yuppie off a ledge, ala Lethal Weapon; he dangles a villain over the side of a building to elicit information, ala Tango & Cash; he leaps off the side of a building and swings into a window below, ala Die Hard; there’s a tense subway altercation, ala The Warriors; and Mick breaks into a crime kingpin’s palatial estate, ala Beverly Hills Cop. The second half of the film, meanwhile, becomes Die Hard in the outback, with Mick in John McClane mode dispatching the villains with a little help from his friends. Mick is compared to the Lone Ranger, Tarzan, and most pointedly Clint Eastwood throughout the film. Even the poster sees Mick adopting a pose that evokes action movie posturing of the era.
Lest these scenes sound exciting, it should be stressed their execution is altogether more sluggish and pedestrian than their action film brethren. It’s possible Hogan watched fellow Antipodean Mel Gibson running open shirt with a gun down Hollywood Boulevard in
Lethal Weapon and thought ‘I can do that … but without the running’. If so, it mostly works; Hogan is fun to watch, knows his limitations as an action hero and works within them. It’s certainly not a miscalculation on the level of Chevy Chase choosing to
double down on “the loneliness of invisibility” in
Memoirs of an Invisible Man, or Eddie Murphy
choosing to play Axel Foley completely straight in
Beverly Hills Cop III. But it also means that the fish-out-of-water comedy that made the New York-set second half of
Crocodile Dundee enjoyable is largely gone, and the sense that Mick might just be a bullshit artist that made the outback-set first half of that film endearing is similarly absent.
Perhaps most surprising is the short shrift afforded Kozlowski’s Sue, especially given the romance that blossomed between co-stars. Sue provided the gateway into Mick’s world in the original, had a job to perform and a character arc of sorts, and enjoyed plenty to do. In contrast, Sue's not given much to do here: she’s kidnapped and then rescued by Mick, tasked with guarding the criminals he captures in the outback, and is essentially the catalyst for Mick’s character arc—from idle tourist in New York to purposeful hunter and protector on his home turf—rather than enjoying an arc of her own. Kozlowski’s performance is good, and it goes without saying she has chemistry with Hogan, but she gets a raw deal character-wise.
Crocodile Dundee director Peter Faiman—who’d worked with Hogan on
The Paul Hogan Show, as well as working with other Australian TV luminaries like Graham Kennedy, Don Lane, Bert Newton, and Ernie Sigley—did not return for the sequel (among his subsequent wide-ranging ventures in media and entertainment, he’d work with John Hughes and Ed O’ Neill on
Dutch, which is nothing to sniff at). In his absence,
Crocodile Dundee II was directed by
the late John Cornell. Like Tom Cruise in recent years, Hogan would gravitate to the same directors on subsequent films: he did another with Cornell,
Almost an Angel, and would work twice with Simon Wincer (
Lightning Jack,
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles) and thrice with Dean Murphy (
Strange Bedfellows,
Charlie & Boots,
The Very Excellent Mr Dundee). But Cornell remains Hogan’s most significant collaborator, as his manager, former co-star on
The Paul Hogan Show, and co-writer and producer on
Crocodile Dundee. Incidentally, Cornell was portrayed by Ryan Corr in the miniseries
Hoges, making him, to the best of my knowledge, only the second director of major Australian motion pictures to appear as a character in a biopic (the other being Charles Chauvel in
Tudawali).
As far as directorial debuts go, Crocodile Dundee II was a big undertaking, albeit one with a fairly safe infrastructure for Cornell, working with his best friend on a commercial sure thing. To his credit, the film is generally well-made, looks crisp and clean thanks to returning DP (and veteran Peter Weir shooter) Russell Boyd, and sounds great thanks to Peter Best’s recognisable score with its delightful main theme. John Meillon makes a welcome return as Mick’s friend and business partner Wally, and Ernie Dingo makes a welcome appearance. But there are fewer jokes than the original, and while enough of them land, the plotting gets in the way of the comedy (not uncommon in this era alas: see also Stripes, Protocol, Spies Like Us, etc.). The action thriller hijinks make the film, ironically, slower-paced and lower-energy than the original, with villains that are lethal only in their blandness.
Ben
