By Jeff Kubik
I’d like to make one thing clear straight away: I’m not going to say “it”.
I’m not going to work that ubiquitous Crocodile Hunter catch phrase into the title of the piece in some kind of witty pun or exclaim it at any point in the review. I’ll leave that to every other review written for Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course.
Having said that, my review proceeds.
Collision Course features a downed intelligence satellite pursued by a bungling good-cop, bad-cop, sexy-cop trio. They’re not important.
Collision Course co-stars Terri Irwin whose main purpose in the movie seems to be looking concerned and occasionally yelling “Nuts!” She’s not important either.
Collision Course stars Steve Irwin of Crocodile Hunter fame. He’s the least important one of them all.
The real star of this movie is a televised persona called “The Crocodile Hunter”. He represents Steve Irwin as accurately as blank stares and toneless voices represent the camera-shy.
He gives the North American public exactly what they’re expecting from an Australian naturalist: devil-may-care animal wrangling mixed up with as much Australian slang and references to his good ol’ dad as possible.
Crocodile Dundee’s got nothing on this guy, Paul Hogan certainly never got his own show.
There’s no doubt that this is a fine family movie. There aren’t any swears, nothing dies and even the movie’s villains aren’t really “bad”.
In the end, however, there isn’t a singe detail about this movie with as much power to evaluate its relative worth as your opinion of Steve Irwin’s televised routine. If you liked him on the Discovery channel, you’ll enjoy what ultimately amounts to two, back-to-back episodes (slightly less than that, as a matter of fact, though there are no commercials).
He grabs animals and yanks them around, they try to bite him and he gets away. Punch the formula and you’ll get the movie.
The only question you have to ask is: “Bob’s your uncle mate, how much of this hyperactive wrangler can I take before I throw my baby to the dingoes?”
For another perspective on this fine film, check out Andrew Ross’ thoughts.