Crocodile Dundee
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DVD Review
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Review
Plot
When a New York reporter Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) hears a story about a man in the Australian outback that’s kills a crocodile with his bare hands, she decides that she must go and interview him. The man in question is Mick “Crocodile” Dundee (Paul Hogan), she spends a few days exploring the outback with him and invites him back to New York to see what city life is like. Will Mick make it in New York and more importantly will Sue be able to resist his Aussie charm.
Review
Crocodile Dundee comes from a time when the whole western world seemed to be in love with everything Australian. In the UK in particular everyone was watching this great new soap opera called Neighbours and everyone was drinking Australian lagers (until they realised that they tasted like nats p**s). Australia seemed to be a land where towns folk were prosperous and all had swimming pools and outback folk had to be rough and tough as just about every living creature from the small spider to the big crocodiles was out to kill you.
My point here is that I believe timing was one of the key elements in Crocodile Dundee’s success. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing actually wrong with the film now as it’s still a fun, enjoyable comedy in it’s own right. Having watched it now for the first time in over ten years though, it just seemed to have aged not quite so well as some other comedies that come from the same period.
One of the things I always really liked about the film, is the character that Paul Hogan plays. This is a man who when out in the wilds faces a battle for his very survival regularly, he is rough and tough and could probably kill all but the strongest opponent. Despite this, he is kind, polite, simple, friendly and a real gentleman. This contrast is I think part of the core of the film. One of the best lines in the film to demonstrate this is when he first gets into New York and they tell him that 10 million people live there. “Gees, this must be the friendliest place on Earth”, he says.
I also like the fact that it almost seems like two films, with the first half showing the city girl trying to cope in the outback and then there’s a complete role reversal, as Dundee has to learn to survive in her jungle. There are problems with the plot however, for example in order to stress him as the bad guy, Sue’s (Linda Kozlowski) boyfriend is so ridiculously unpleasant to Dundee from the second they meet that it just doesn’t make sense.
Despite these problems I still enjoyed the film and was happy to watch it again after such a long time. I’m not sure if it’s a film I could keep going back to and perhaps once every few years is enough.
Video/Audio
I think it’s probably best to describe both the video and audio quality as functional rather than anything special. The film is presented in its original 2.35:1 format and they have at least had the decency to make it Anamorphic. However it does quite often suffer from dirt, scratches etc and can appear quite grainy at times.
The audio track is in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo, don’t expect your surround sound system to get much of a workout here. The dialogue is at least clear, but basically the whole sound stage is coming from the front speakers. One strange thing I noticed is that at one point in the film, the word F**k is dubbed over really badly, yet this can’t be to keep the rating down as later on in the film someone blurts out the same word, without any dubbing over at all.
Extras
This shouldn’t take very long, let’s see know we have a Theatrical Trailer and um, well that’s pretty much it.
Overall
This is a good fun 80’s comedy presented on a fairly lacklustre sub-standard disk. Unless your really fanatical about the film, I would recommend it as a rental only. If the disk quality was higher I’d give this a fairly high mark, as it is though I don’t think I can give it more than a 3 out of 5.
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