Kangaroo Jack (2003)

 

KANGAROO JACK (2003)

By Ralph Santini – ½

The movie opens in the wild outback of Australia with a nice looking environment, a fact I’m reporting because I happen to love looking at the continent’s landscape and that’s the only thing I liked in this movie. It looks absolutely wonderful. It also tries to behave like a small traveling TV advert, which we make us wish to go on a cool journey down under. The concept of going on a cool journey down under would a lot more fun than everything this movie. 

“Kangaroo Jack” is awful. It hurts above common awfulness as the monitor lizard successfully preys upon the frill-necked lizard. It is absolutely devoid of laughs. No laughs whatsoever. I felt no humor at all. I don’t know whether this contained any laughs at all. I believe this work was merely an awful idea from the start, and no screenplay, no filmmaker, no acting talent could have rescued it.

The story involves a young Italian-American hairdresser (Jerry O’Connell) from Brooklyn and his African-American sidekick (Anthony Anderson), whom he befriended after he saved the hero’s life when they were children they eventually become 20 years both being victims of a chase over a stolen truck he uses to bring stolen TV sets to mobsters. Eventually caught in the same truck by the cops, they begin a wild-goose chase which is extended in the steel mill where the mobsters were waiting for the TV sets they were stealing. It all leads to obviously disastrous results where the hero’s stepfather (a hopelessly one performance by Christopher Walken) is annoyingly upset over this botched chase.  So what happens?

Walken gives his stepson and sidekick only one chance to redeem themselves by sending him to Australia and pay some hit men $50,000. There is only one problem. It starts when they accidentally hit a kangaroo on the road down under and they decide to cradle it with the idiotic sidekick giving his red jacket and with the hero’s sunglasses they seem to think he resembles one of Christopher Walken’s thugs. And guess what? When the Kangaroo regains consciousness he hops away it is revealed that the money is in that jacket. That’s right. They lose the money to the kangaroo and they must chase it before everything is too late.

There is not one single witty moment in this film. Not one. Even the CGI special effects of The Kangaroo aren’t funny, and I don’t think I enjoyed any part of it at all, unless it was meant to show CGI-assisting acting hilariously almost being hurt. The only good thing about this kangaroo is that screenplay doesn’t focus much on that marsupial. The biggest disadvantage in that is that kids might be ripped off when they’ll notice that in this film.