Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001)

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles arrives thirteen years after the second film and roughly a decade after anyone thought to ask. Paul Hogan returns as the outback survivalist, now relocated to California because his partner has taken a job running a newspaper bureau. The premise is a fish-out-of-water comedy, which is to say it is a comedy about a man who does not understand escalators. Critics were unkind. The film sits at eleven percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the Razzie voters nominated it for Worst Remake or Sequel, an honor it lost to a planet of apes.

Assessing the film's progressive sensibilities requires patience, because there is very little to assess. The supporting cast includes Paul Rodriguez and Aida Turturro in minor comedic parts, though they function as ordinary players in the story, not as a statement. Linda Kozlowski's Sue holds a demanding professional post, which was already a commonplace of working-woman storytelling well before this century. The cross-cultural friction on display is strictly Australian against American. Nobody in the film has a thought about race, and nobody has a thought about much else either.

The plot eventually concerns stolen Balkan paintings smuggled onto a film set, which sounds like a doorway into historical reckoning and turns out to be a MacGuffin with a shipping label. The crocodile-hunting ban that opens the film is a device to explain Mick's diminished finances, not an argument about conservation. There is no economic critique, no self-acceptance arc, no sermon. Roger Ebert asked who you would rather have as a role model, Dundee or the stars of Joe Dirt and Freddy Got Fingered. The question answers itself, and it is the most substantial moral inquiry the film inspires.