 Kangaroo Jack (2002) They have to get the money back from the kangaroo and avoid being killed by the mob. A recipe for uncontrollable vomiting, right? Actually, it's just recipe for pointlessness. I wish I could say I hated the movie, but it's so inoffensively nondescript, so absolutely middle-of-the-road, it was like a spontaneous blank spot emerging in my brain as it unfolded. Even reviewing it seems pointless, as any crticism of Kangaroo Jack seems totally beside the point. The movie was obsolete from the get-go.
Co-written by the guy who inseminated Elizabeth Hurley, the film is as benign and bland and unremarkable as a marketing ploy devised by the Australian Tourism Board, or a company that sells kangaroo dolls with sunglasses: totally family-friendly in the most generic way possible. Even the extended "farting camels" scene couldn't raise my hackles. When your biggest selling point is "Jerry O'Connell vs. a talking kangaroo," you are not a filmmaker so much as a used-concepts dealer. "Mobsters in the outback!" enthuses the comfortably "hipster" studio executive. O'Connell – along with Estella Warren, who plays his tepid love interest – is simply not famous. He's not. I defy you to prove to me that he's famous. He and Warren are nothing more than animatronic dolls used for scene dressing: both mildly attractive yet lacking in comic timing, sexual chemistry, or anything actually human. From the wacky police chase in which a bunch of TVs fly off the back of a truck to the comically fat black sidekick, from the crazy drunk man who's also the only pilot who can find the kangaroo to the dream sequence in which the kangaroo talks in a thick Aussie twang, Kangaroo Jack tries its darndest to be Xtreme. It is Xtreme … Xtremely tedious.
Review by Crimedog |
