BEFORE: Would it help to point out that I recorded this off of cable just to fill a DVD? I hate having empty space at the end of a DVD when the movies are too short, it feels like I'm wasting money. No? What if I mentioned that this is a birthday SHOUT-out to Christopher Walken (last seen in "Wedding Crashers"), born 3/31/1943? No, I didn't think so.
But the birthday rule is in effect, so this film gets the nod tonight over "Stuart Little 2" - so yes, I'm going from mice to kangaroos. I realize that mice are rodents and kangaroos are marsupials, but just work with me here, OK? Linking actors is easy since Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken both were in that remake of "The Stepford Wives" a few years ago.
THE PLOT: Two childhood friends get caught up with the mob and are forced to deliver $50,000 to Australia, but things go haywire when the money is lost to a wild kangaroo.
AFTER: The comic book blogs are filling up with stories about a grifter who's been appearing on the convention circuit, essentially copying other artists' original works and passing them off as his own, and posting a list of his fraudulent art credits at his booth to legitimize himself. He's about to be banned from the circuit - however I'm cursed with the ability to see the other side of an issue, and I'm questioning where the plagiarism line is about to be drawn - after all, even a respected comic-book artist gets paid at conventions to draw original poses of what are essentially non-original, copyrighted characters. So if Jim Lee gets paid $200 to draw Batman at a convention, DC/Warner Bros. doesn't see any of that money - but should they? I agree that this guy is a fraud, but I think it's a slippery slope once you start defining what constitutes "original" material.
This relates to tonight's film, because I question how I should treat a film that stole/borrowed its main plot from "Crocodile Dundee 2", with New York gangsters pursuing people through the outback. Is the presence of an animated kangaroo enough of a change to constitute original material? Well, I'm not a lawyer so I'll leave this issue to the injured parties.
Anyway, this is more similar in tone to "Dumb & Dumber" or "Stealing Harvard", where two idiots are in a situation that keeps getting worse and worse. And supposedly this is based on an urban legend, in which a couple of guys hit a kangaroo with their Jeep, and thought it would be funny to take their picture with the "dead" animal and placed their jacket on the kangaroo, only to have it wake up and leap away, with the car keys (and/or passport) in the jacket pocket. Did it ever really happen? Who knows...
And a few notes about the kangaroo - the animation is actually pretty acceptable. Someone who doesn't know much about this "CGI" thing (kids and senior citizens, I imagine) might wonder how they got a kangaroo to wear a jacket and leap around on cue. And twice in the film the kangaroo talks - during a fantasy sequence when a character is hallucinating, and again during the end credits.
Which sort of raises the question - was the whole film originally planned to be a talking kangaroo film, in the style of "Alvin and the Chipmunks"? Did cooler heads prevail in the editing room, or did someone devise the talking kangaroo sequence just because they could, and they needed to find a way to work it in? And if the kangaroo had talked throughout the film, would that be any better, or much, much worse? In the end, does this constitute "restraint", or not?
Again, I'm cursed with the ability to see the other side of an issue - in this case, how bad this film COULD have been. It's still not a great film, you'll see what passes for plot points coming a mile away, and there's way too much slapstick and scatalogical humor, but I think it could have been a lot worse.
Also starring Jerry O'Connell, Anthony Anderson, Estella Warren, and a quick cameo from Dyan Cannon.
RATING: 4 out of 10 camel farts
No comments:
Post a Comment