Director: John Stainton
Starring: Steve Irwin, Terri Irwin, Magda Szubanski, David Wenham, Lachy Hulme, Aden Young, Steve Bastoni, Kate Beahan, Kenneth Ransom
The phenomenon of Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter largely bypassed me during his lifetime. I was in my twenties, considered myself too cool (so wrong) for Steve Irwin’s shenanigans, and was uninterested, like Tommy Lee Jones, in sanctioning buffoonery. As I potter towards middle age, I find myself increasingly in awe of people at the very apex of their profession, be it Fred Astaire dancing like a boss, Jacqueline du Pre commanding a cello, or Elvis bringing the house down. If your profession is wrestling deadly reptiles into submission with extraordinary zeal and strength, then you have my attention and at least a modicum of my admiration.
In The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, an important high-tech MacGuffin falls from outer space and lands in the Australian outback, where it is promptly snapped up by a crocodile and ends up in its gullet. American intelligence agents (Lachy Hulme, Kenneth Ransom, Kate Beahan) are dispatched to the outback to locate the MacGuffin, where they encounter not only a crocodile-loathing farmer (Magda Szubanski), but the Crocodile Hunter himself, Steve Irwin, and his wife and partner in conservation Terri, who come in contact with the MacGuffin-chomping beast. Hijinks ensue.
The Crocodile Hunter was a global phenomenon ala that other Crocodile-monikered Australian export, so it’s fitting that Irwin’s theatrical debut (and swansong) was as much a Hollywood product as an Australian one, released, incidentally, one year after Dundee went Hollywood (literally) in Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. In addition to casting several Australian actors as Americans, Collision Course was co-produced by a Hollywood producer, Arnold Rifkin, who mostly produced Bruce Willis vehicles in the 2000s, including Bandits, Hart’s War, Tears of the Sun, The Whole Ten Yards … films which at the time looked like the bottom of the Bruce Willis barrel, though Willis had far greater/lesser plans in store. Collision Course was also released by a Hollywood studio, MGM, albeit one seemingly perennially on the verge of ceasing to exist. MGM is unquestionably a legendary studio with an illustrious legacy, but its 2002 slate was a crapshoot, showcasing undistinguished outings for its distinguished franchises and IPs (Die Another Day, Red Dragon, Rollerball) and iffy originals (Hart’s War, Windtalkers), with Barbershop and Collision Course a pair of modestly-budgeted crowd-pleasers.
Is Collision Course crowd-pleasing? On the one hand, the scenes featuring the titular conservationist are the main attraction, and are mostly entertaining. The hook of the film is basically to drop an episode of Irwin’s TV program into an action adventure film, or vice versa. Consequently, early scenes featuring the Irwins are single- or two-camera recreations of the sorts of encounters with snakes, spiders, joeys, and of course crocodiles commonly seen on their program. These scenes gradually become larger in scale and more cinematic, with multiple angles and cuts, blending genuine and staged moments with some cinematic trickery plastering the cracks. There’s some impressive stuff here, and I enjoyed that Irwin maintained his direct address to the viewer throughout, even in fight scenes atop a moving vehicle, to amusing effect. In hindsight, the film captures lightning in a bottle, showcasing a true original with some undeniable screen presence and fairly unbridled energy. Like Crocodile Dundee 2, Collision Course was directed by a long-time collaborator with the star, as a vehicle for expanding the appeal of said star.
On the flip side, Collision Course pads out that bottle of lightning with gunk: scenes of intelligence operatives at Langley, the agents bumbling in the field, and Szubanski bumbling around her farm all feel generic and lazily executed. This exacerbates the cynical nature of the film as a cash-in, a product that exists largely to ride the wave of its star’s popularity, whatever its other good intentions. I don’t like to use the word slumming, as it’s a fairly relative term, but if not slumming then this was certifiably an easy paycheck for capable actors like Hulme, David Wenham, Steve Bastoni, Aden Young, and Steven Vidler, and watching Collision Course with viewings of Wenham and Bastoni’s exceptional work in The Boys and Blue Murder in recent memory certainly did them no favours with this spectator. The film uses CinemaScope (2.35:1) photography for these genre-based filler scenes, and narrower 1.85:1 photography for scenes featuring the Irwins (although it’s a standard widescreen format, the latter is used here to simulate a television look). It’s a cute detail, but ultimately there’s little of interest to showcase in the Scope framing.
Ultimately, as its title alone denotes, The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course was never going to be high art. But it’s a pity the film’s obvious and admirable respect for its marquee attraction did not quite translate to respect for its audience’s intelligence or creating a film with an ongoing shelf life.
Director: Rob Stewart
Starring: Andrew Clarke, Simon James, Kate McNeil, Moya O'Sullivan, Fiona Shannon
Where's Skippy these days? With regular revivals of American children's properties (Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes: Back in Action), routine remakes of Australian New Wave classics (Wake in Fright, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Storm Boy), and plentiful local family films with animal stars (Storm Boy again, Red Dog and its sequel, Oddball, Penguin Bloom), I'm genuinely surprised we haven't seen a Skippy remake/reboot/retread/reimagining. Have filmmakers and audiences become too cool for Skippy, a well-liked character with a long entertainment legacy whose doppelganger appears on our coat of arms and nominal national airline? Of course, it may be the right filmmaker and story haven't emerged. I'd prefer to think that over the alternative, i.e. that state and government funding bodies, supposedly committed to financing worthwhile Australian stories for both Australian and international audiences, are of the opinion that Skippy wouldn't be as culturally edifying subject matter as, say, Hounds of Love or Killing Ground.
I say all this despite being fairly underwhelmed by The Adventures of Skippy, though in fairness that underwhelmedness has more to do with its form than its content …
Skippy was first introduced in the 1960s television series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, which ran for 91 episodes and spawned a feature film, animated show, documentary, and a 1992 TV revival called The Adventures of Skippy. The first three episodes of this 39-episode revival are currently streaming on Stan as a one-hour compilation. The episodes follow Sonny Hammond (Andrew Clarke), formerly the child protagonist of the original series, his two children (Simon James and Kate McNeil), and their adopted kangaroo named Skippy (Skippy 2.0?) as they join a wildlife attraction in Queensland and must contend with saboteurs from a rival park.
Of the cast, the very likeable Andrew Clarke—seven years after Anzacs, five years after Les Patterson Saves the World, and one year before headlining The Man from Snowy River, making him an Australian cultural emissary of sorts—does solid patriarch well, and James and McNeil deliver refreshingly unaffected—if at times a little shrill—child performances. The titular marsupial feels somewhat rationed in terms of screen-time, and some viewers may be disappointed by his limited skill set and lack of anthropomorphism, perhaps in response to the Fast Forward parodies of the preceding years in which Skippy’s ingenuity encapsulated everything from defusing nuclear bombs to open heart surgery to bank robbery. Personally, I would have liked more screen-time, but was fine with the inexpressiveness of the kangaroo and that it wasn’t assigned human emotions or able to perform feats of derring-do.
Down Under Flix usually focuses on films, making this Adventures of Skippy compilation an outlier to the usual fare covered here. Consequently, readers who are primarily film fans probably won’t get a lot of satisfaction from it as a feature—it’s far too brief, creatively rote, and doesn’t feel rounded or substantial—and readers who are TV fans foremost probably won’t get the sort of fix they’re after, though remaining episodes can be tracked down. But it’s an amiable and serviceable hour of entertainment.
Oh, and ...
