Crocodile Dundee II

The success of Crocodile Dundee in America has become such a cultural oddity that even the idea of Crocodile Dundee sequels is now regarded as joke (see season 6 of How I Met Your Mother for an extended reference to Crocodile Dundee 3). With this in mind, revisiting Crocodile Dundee II filled me with rather low expectations, none of which were really exceeded. Paul Hogan and co. attempted to recapture the magic of the first film by reversing the formula (a common feature of sequels) Surprisingly, Crocodile Dundee II it was actually a financial success at the time of its release - coming quite hot on the heels of the original film - but it doesn't hold up more than two decades later.

The film picks up almost immediately after the first film, with Mick Dundee living in New York with his girlfriend Sue (Linda Kozlowski). Dundee is sort of, but not really, looking for a job but he's forced to put this on hold when Sue is kidnapped by Colombian druglords (yes, really) and he enlists the help of a New York gang to rescue her. The druglords aren't happy about this, and they follow Dundee and his girl back to Australia, where they play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse in the outback wilderness.

A lot of the humour from the first film relied on Dundee being a fish-out-of-water. Crocodile Dundee II tries hard to keep this element alive by setting the sequel directly after the first film, with Dundee still very much naive to the ways of New York City. The reversal of the formula comes by then having Dundee and his antagonists travel from America back to Australia. The flaw in this is that Dundee's antagonists aren't even from the U.S., so the cultural juxtapositions become less effective, and the formula that involves Dundee unwittingly thumbing his nose at big city America's social mores gets somewhat lost in the mix during the second half of the film.

The other major issue is that this film isn't even the same genre as the original film, with director John Cornell exchanging romance for action in an attempt to make his own bastardisation of Lethal Weapon. Dundee becomes a bog-standard action hero, the film may as well be called Crocodile Dundee vs. Drugs... he's like a wisecracking ocker Rambo facing off against sinister bad guys and picking them off one-by-one. It's like a parallel dimension compared to the first film; imagine if someone made a sequel to Uncle Buck and all of a sudden John Candy's character was fighting South African mercenaries. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense... it's cartoonish and it doesn't hold up against the original.

DIRECTOR: John Cornell
WRITER/SOURCE: Paul Hogan and Brett Hogan.
KEY ACTORS: Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, John Meillon, Juan Fernandez, Hechtor Ubarry, Stephen Root, Luis Guzman, Ernie Dingo, Charles S. Dutton, Gus Mercurio

RELATED TEXTS:
- The first film, Crocodile Dundee, and the second sequel, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.
- As mentioned in the review, this film has more in common with Lethal Weapon and First Blood than it does with standard fish-out-of-water comedies and romances.