Crocodile Dundee (1986)

Crazily popular on its original release, Crocodile Dundee is a fun, but otherwise lacking, fish out of water comedy. Paul Hogan is Mick "Crocodile" Dundee, a rugged bushwhacker, whose natural habitat is the Australian outback. Linda Kozlowski is Sue Charlton, a New York reporter. While in Australia, she learns how Mick Dundee managed to escape a crocodile attack and decides to hunt him down to write a newspaper feature.

For the first half of the film, we see Sue observe Mick as he knocks somebody out in a pub brawl, subdues a water buffalo with mind magic, deals with a sneaky snake, scares off some kangaroo poachers, cooks up some yams and fish, and joins an Aboriginal tribe for a dance. Oh, he also saves Sue’s life when a crocodile tries to steal her handbag. Strewth! All of this show of masculine strength and bravado clearly impresses Sue who gives smile after smile of approval to Mr. Dundee, and this inevitably leads them into a kiss. She then invites him to New York, where the tables are turned. It’s now his turn to adapt to her natural habitat.

In the USA for the second half of the film, we see Mick contend with things like escalators, tipping, bidets, pedestrians, classy restaurants, roads, prostitutes, trans people, drug use, baths, and dinner parties. Yes, it’s the 1980s. People liked their dinner parties. As somebody who hasn’t previously been exposed to civilised society and their sensibilities, Mick Dundee’s approach to life in New York is rather naive and simplistic. He’s amicable but self-assured, very much in the camp of "I don’t really care what people think of me". He greets everybody with a friendly "G'day", and those that rub him up the wrong way get a calm fist to their face. Although some parts of the film haven’t aged that well, most scenes are light and humorous. It’s just that, that’s all they are. They don’t really enhance the wafer-thin plot or the rather two-dimensional characters.

The plot is simply that Mick Dundee and Sue find themselves falling in love. However, Sue’s boyfriend, Richard Mason (Mark Blum) is the editor of the newspaper that she writes for, and her father is its owner. Rather than this situation leading to awkward dilemmas and a complex battle of logic over emotion, it seems to resolve without any drama or tension at all. There’s one scene where Sue, Richard and Mick go for a meal together. But even that comes to a rushed end. And, although it’s clear that every macho thing that Croc Dundee does impresses Sue, we don’t really see how their relationship develops other than on that simple surface level.

We do get to see one insight into why Mick is the person he is. Sue asks him for his opinion about the nuclear argument and general world affairs. He says, "Well, you see. Aborigines don’t own the land. They belong to it. It’s like their mother. See those rocks? Been standing there for 600 million years. Still be there when you and I are gone. So arguing over who owns them is like two fleas arguing over who owns the dog they live on." I loved that line. This world view really does put into perspective why people who live more simplistic lives tend to be happier.

The late 1980s was a time when Australia mania was huge in the UK. Soaps like Neighbours and Home and Away were amongst the most-viewed television programmes in the country, stars like Kylie Minogue and Jason Donavan were topping the music charts, and TV-AM spent a fortnight broadcasting from the country for its bicentennial. And it seems that, when Crocodile Dundee got its TV premiere in the UK on Christmas Day 1989, viewers lapped it up. It still holds the record for the UK’s biggest Christmas Day TV audience, when 21.77 million people watched it.

I’m pretty sure I was one of them, and I remember absolutely loving it. But I guess I probably wasn’t too invested in its plot, which is handy because it didn’t really have one. It would have been Crocodile Dundee’s humorous antics while in New York that tickled my festive funny bone. Nowadays, it’s still entertaining, but nothing special. The Australia scenes are well-filmed, but don’t really show much of the country’s natural beauty, and New York is just your typical New York.

The version of the film available today is Crocodile Dundee: The Encore Cut, which ironically, given that "encore" means more, is actually shorter than the original. A couple of scenes that may be offensive today have been removed, specifically where Mick suspects that a woman chatting him up in a bar is actually a man, so gropes her to check. Yep, that’s obviously wrong, Even more wrong is when he does the same to a woman, who looks a little masculine, later.

But wrongness aside, I’m not sure I agree with removing it altogether. The film is meant to be about showing somebody who’s been taken out of the Australian wilderness and placed slap-bang in the middle of the hustle and bustle of 1980s New York. But modern civilisation doesn’t always mean it’s a more enlightened civilisation. It’s just that it has a different world view. We already know of Mick’s perspective on the world. It might be simpler than that of the modern 1980s, but it doesn’t mean it’s intentionally backwards. While the film tries to portray him as an Australian Tarzan who can charm or thump his way through any situation, it also depicts his more “traditional” views and opinions. They might be right to him, and he may have no ill-intent when showing or acting on them, but they are wrong to others. Removing such scenes removes some of nuances of Mick Dundee’s character. Or am I reading too much into it? Perhaps it was simply a cheap gag at the expense of a trans person? I can understand why the scenes have been removed for certain platforms, but I don’t really like films being tampered with after their release. Fair enough, if it’s for mainstream TV broadcast (which is how I watched the film this time around), but the original should still be available somewhere. It’s a product of the time. Right ok, that’ll do for this review now as I’ve gone off on a rant now.