The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee Parent Guide

Paul Hogan, the Australian star of the beloved Crocodile Dundee movies, is enjoying a quiet life in Los Angeles, until he finds out that he is being awarded a knighthood by the Queen of England. Reluctantly thrust back into the spotlight, Hogan tries his best to keep his reputation intact, but things just seem to keep going wrong.

I have a vague awareness of Crocodile Dundee through the cultural zeitgeist, but I’ve never actually seen it, or any of Paul Hogan’s other work. I can’t help but wonder if having a familiarity of Hogan would have helped make this movie work for me. As it stands, I’m not 100% sure what I just watched, and I’m don’t think the film knows what it is supposed to be either. On the one hand, the writers seem to be attempting some sort of meta commentary on modern Hollywood, cancel culture, and hipsters, but it also wants to be a coming-of-age story for octogenarians, and yet somehow it mostly comes across as a desperate vanity project to try to get people to remember that Paul Hogan is still alive. There doesn’t seem to be a point to any of it. It’s not that none of it works, I think there are some flashes of brilliant commentary on the state of Hollywood, but as a whole there is no clear focus to bring it all together. If you’re going to do something meta, you have to commit fully, and Mr. Dundee, well, doesn’t. There’s a whole joke about how Chevy Chase has a pristine reputation and is universally loved, which I think was meant to poke fun at the fact that in real life his reputation is the opposite, but the joke doesn’t really land and becomes more frustrating that anything.

On the positive side, John Cleese is fantastic and the scenes he’s in are genuinely funny. Paul Hogan himself is charming and charismatic. There are also cameos by pretty much every famous Australian in Hollywood, which must have taken a lot of work from the producers. Chris Hemsworth doesn’t just show up for anybody! On the flip side, having Mel Gibson do a cameo talking about cancel culture felt to me to be a bit in poor taste.

Aside from bad language this film is scores well for content issues, but I can’t imagine any children or teens being interested in watching it. If you’re a big Crocodile Dundee fan you might enjoy seeing Paul Hogan back on the big screen, but other than that I’m not sure why you would want to waste 88 minutes of your life on a movie that forgot to have a purpose.