Not every movie has to be a serious examination of the human
condition.
Not every movie has to be a serious examination of the human condition. Some movies are there just for those times when you want a little silliness in your life, and the new movie “Kangaroo Jack,” currently playing at Premiere Cinemas, fits that bill.
No, I’m not here to tell you that the 87-minute “Kangaroo Jack” is a great movie or even a good movie. It’s just a bit of zany, obviously unbelievable, mindless fun intended to make you chuckle a little. The humor is obviously aimed at a more juvenile level with a mixture of sight gags and slapstick.
Director David McNally does not let this movie take itself seriously for a minute, and no one else should. Otherwise, they’d walk out on this half-buddy picture, half-farce.
In what looks like a cross between an Abbott and Costello movie and “The Godfather,” “Kangaroo Jack” is a fast-paced comedy romp. It’s primarily about Charlie Carbone, played by Jerry O’Connell and his long-time friend Louis Booker, played by an entertaining Anthony Anderson.
The pair, who became inseparable friends after Louis saved Charlie from drowning when they were 10, are constantly in and out of trouble, primarily because of Louis’ hair-brained get-rich-quick schemes.
Louis’ latest shenanigan lands the pair in hot water with Charlie Carbone’s stepfather, Sal. Beyond his crooked dealings, the colorful Sal Maggio is a notoriously ruthless mob boss played to the hilt by Christopher Walken.
To get the two of them out of his way, Sal gives Charlie and Louis an assignment to supposedly redeem themselves. They are ordered to go off to Australia and deliver $50,000 to a dubious character down under known only as Mr. Smith. But the money ends up with a mischievous kangaroo, who first whacks Charlie with a martial-arts kick, then high-tails it into the Outback with the cash.
There really is a nice core to the movie, and that has to do with the on-screen relationship between O’Connell and Anderson, who play up their characters’ manic drive to keep the story going.
Their problem is where the title character comes in as, in a preposterous plot twist, they lose the money they were sent to deliver when the package is left in Louis’ lucky red jacket, which almost never brings him luck.
The jacket is jokingly put on a kangaroo they think was killed after they hit it on the road, so they pick up the kangaroo, which bears a resemblance to a friend from Brooklyn, to take some goofy travel pictures. They stop laughing when the kangaroo, which was only stunned, wakes up and hops away with the money.
The creature that causes so much mischief is a likable combination of real red kangaroo (the largest marsupial in the world) and computer-generated special effects.
The only problem is the filmmakers spend too much time on the special effects, making Jack so cartoonish that it not only weakens the effects but gets tiresome very quickly and goes from being cute to being rather bothersome.
With the possible exception of a semi-romantic scene by a waterfall – obviously produced on a sound stage – and some overly flatulent camels, this movie has very little bad language and no more violence than your average television cop show. (Well, maybe not that much.)
This movie will probably do well on DVD and in the rental stores for those times when you just want to watch something silly to take you out of the daily doldrums, or you just want an hour and a half to escape.
