Paul Hogan’s The Very Excellent Mr Dundee is worse than bad — it’s embarrassing
Criticising Paul Hogan feels a little like taking on Don Bradman or the Chiko Roll, but this film is embarrassing.
The kindest comment I can make about Paul Hogan’s new movie, The Very Excellent Mr Dundee, is that it includes John Cleese’s worst performance ever (and, yes, I have seen Fierce Creatures from 1997).
It’s a backhanded compliment, I know, but briefly thinking about one of the funniest men in history being so bad creates some breathing room before having to pull the Dundee-sized knife on 80-year-old Hogan.
I wanted this film, Hogan’s first in more than a decade, to be good. He’s had his failed marriages and rows with the tax office but, at the end of the day, he is an Australian cultural icon.
His television shows, aided and abetted by long-time collaborator John Cornell, remain at the sharp end of Ocker larrikinism.
Crocodile Dundee, a 10BA tax-break movie as it happens, cost $8m and made $US330m, breaking global box office records for an independent Australian film, a fact that is mentioned in this new 90-minute movie almost as many times as is Mick Dundee’s “that’s not a knife” moment.
Hogan was nominated for a screenwriting Oscar (along with Cornell and Ken Shadie) and won a Golden Globe as best actor in a comedy. Good on him. No one can take any of that away from him.
Criticising him feels a little like taking on Don Bradman or the Chiko Roll, but one has to review any film on its merits. Crocodile Dundee was followed by two unsuccessful sequels, in 1988 and 2001. So, The Very Excellent Mr Dundee, directed and co-written by Dean Murphy, can be seen as the fourth, worst and one has to hope last in a series. It’s worse than bad. It’s embarrassing.
In short, it centres on the real Paul Hogan. He lives in his Hollywood mansion and likes to watch the Ellen DeGeneres show on TV and do crosswords. He wants to live a quiet life, dreams of returning to Australia and has no interest in making movies.
This changes when he is offered a knighthood, which resurrects studio interest in yet another Crocodile Dundee movie. A reluctant Hoges meets studio executives and it is here that the only two funny moments occur.
One is when the executives suggest Will Smith would be perfect as Mick Dundee’s son. The other — the only time I laughed — is when they agree that Hoges has a point about the age difference between himself and Rachel McAdams, as his potential love interest. The reason they agree is what made me laugh.
Now he is back in the public eye, Hogan falls into lots of misunderstandings that are only partly his fault. Black Lives Matter is part of it. The Catholic Church is part of it. The media goes bananas.
It’s akin to Larry David in the hilarious TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm and, for a brief moment, I thought David had a cameo role as a bad-headlines veteran called in to counsel Hoges. But it’s not him, it’s Chevy Chase and he’s wise to cover his face with a baseball cap throughout.
The other bad-headline-making actor who comes to mind is Mel Gibson, and he does appear, from file footage I think. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Gibson’s independent movie The Passion of the Christ, which he self-financed at $US30m, made twice as much as Crocodile Dundee.
Hoges has mates so there are lots of other cameos, including Shane Jacobson as a Hollywood Boulevard Crocodile Dundee impersonator. Hogan did the same for Jacobson in 2018 in the director’s previous movie, That’s Not My Dog! Olivia Newton-John pops up, as does Wayne Knight, Newman the postman from Seinfeld, for reasons that defy explanation.
There’s a running joke throughout that Hogan has never been a good actor. He’s in on the joke, so that’s OK. Here, though, he almost doesn’t act. It looks like his Madam Tussauds model has taken the role. He walks and talks through this role, telegraphing every joke, and there’s no pleasure to take from watching him do so.
One star
The Very Excellent Mr Dundee (M) is showing on Amazon Prime.
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