Kangaroo Jack (2003)

Making a high-quality family movie can be one of the most daunting tasks for a screenwriter to be approached with. The movie must work on many different levels. It must capture the attention of children with relatable, goofy characters as well as fun action and visuals. It must also be able to entertain adults because they will need to watch the movies with their children. Thus, a fine line must be ridden throughout family movies to appease both the child and adult audiences. A well-rounded script, as well as a well-rounded final film, must be created.

Usually, a movie will fall to one side of the line. It will become so childish that it’ll lose the adult audience, or it will be too adult in subject matter, leading adults to not want children to see it. Either way, something in the mixture of adult and child content doesn’t mix. Sometimes the movie will try to do both and end up as a mature story told with immature, childish comedy. It was definitely what brought about the failure of Kangaroo Jack.

Louis (Anthony Anderson) saved Charlie (Jerry O’Connell) from drowning as a child. That event caused them to become best friends. The twist was that Charlie ended up being the level-headed one and Louis was the troublemaker. When they botched the transport of stolen televisions that led to the bust of a thievery ring, Charlie’s stepfather, mob boss Salvatore Maggio (Christopher Walken), sent them on a trip to Australia. They were to hand an envelope filled with fifty thousand dollars to the mysterious Mr. Smith (Marton Csokas). But when the envelope was stolen by a kangaroo that they named Jackie Legs, Louis and Charlie had to get it back before Mr. Smith could kill them for missing payment.

Kangaroo Jack fit right into that side of family movies where the story was a little too mature for the whole family, even though the material played as goofy enough for kids. There was a mob connection. The main characters had to outrun police that were arresting everybody. They had to outrun a mysterious man whose money they had lost. He was trying to kill them. They almost died in a plane crash. All that stuff was rather adult. But it was accentuated with a kangaroo wearing a jacket and doing goofy things. There was a scene where Charlie imagined the kangaroo talking to him and singing Rapper’s Delight. It was a mixture that never quite worked.

To fully understand where Kangaroo Jack went wrong, the story must be analyzed deeper than that quick little rundown of everything. Some of the nuances must be described to fully comprehend how poorly the two tones of the film mix. It could have been a good movie had it toned down on the adult or the family content, but in trying to have both, it created a Frankenstein’s monster of unexpected proportions. That is why a deeper look is coming up.

The perfect place to start would be in the opening of Kangaroo Jack. It perfectly exemplified how the adult and child tones never quite mixed. As a child, Charlie was playing on the beach. He ran into Louis, who was using a metal detector to find any valuables that might be under the sand. Charlie’s stepdad’s apprentice, Frankie (played by Michael Shannon when the character was an adult), threw a football to Charlie. Only, he didn’t throw it to Charlie. He threw it twenty yards beyond Charlie, into the ocean. Charlie went to catch it but couldn’t swim. There was also a massive undertow. Louis had to pull Charlie to safety, thus solidifying their relationship.

All in all, it was a nice story about how two lifelong friends became such good friends. The issue with the scene was how horrific the event leading to that was. Frankie wasn’t playing with Charlie. He didn’t accidentally put Charlie in a deadly position. He was trying to kill Charlie and make it look like an accident. Why? No reason. He simply wanted to be rid of Charlie and he was going to do it by making Charlie drown. As much as there was the heartwarming friendship blossoming in the scene, it was set in motion through attempted murder. That was rather dark for a children’s movie about friendship.

The next chunk of scenes involved the setup of the plot. Charlie and Louis were chased by the police while driving a stolen truck filled with stolen televisions. They thought they escaped when they drove through an intersection and caused a massive car accident behind them. When they arrived at a warehouse to drop off the five remaining televisions, they found out they were doing a run for Salvatore. They also discovered that the police were still hot on their trail. Charlie and Louis escaped, but everyone else in the warehouse was arrested and the operation was shut down.

This led into Salvatore chastising the pair for ruining one source of his income. He came up with a way that they could make it up to him. They were given a package that they were not to open and told to take it to Australia and deliver it to Mr. Smith. They got on a plane, looked in the package, and were surprised to find fifty thousand dollars. There was a strange scene where they were locked in the airplane bathroom talking about the money while a passenger and a flight attendant overheard them, thinking they were talking about their poop.

When they got to Australia, they had to go through security. Louis was smart enough to hide the money on himself and get through while Charlie was taken in and searched for having scissors. Charlie was a hairdresser and, for some bone-headed reason, thought it would be a good idea to bring his hairdressing kit to Australia. After leaving the airport, they got into a Jeep and jumped onto the outback roads. They ended up hitting a kangaroo. Louis thought it would be a good idea to take pictures with what he assumed was a dead animal. He put his lucky jacket on it, with the money still in the pocket, and started taking selfies with a Polaroid camera. The kangaroo wasn’t dead, though. It hopped off with the money and the jacket.

Now would be a good time to get back into the tonal inconsistencies. The plot of Kangaroo Jack was dependent upon the mob elements. The mob elements were frequently serious and deadly. Charlie and Louis would do anything to stay on Salvatore’s good side because Salvatore could have them killed at the drop of a hat. That was why when he suggested that they go to Australia to deliver the package, they barely hesitated. If they refused, they risked whatever gruesome fate he chose for them. They were agreeing out of fear of injury or death. This was also part of why they risked their lives to escape the police by, yet unmentioned, jumping down a garbage chute of which they did not know the exit point. They would rather injury or death than be captured by the police, and they would rather an impulse trip to Australia than be injured or killed by Salvatore.

The dead kangaroo pictures were also a dark thing to have in a movie where the level of comedy was clearly targeted at children. Louis and Charlie hit a kangaroo with their Jeep. They clearly thought they had killed the kangaroo. Rather than move the body out of the road and contact some sort of authority, they decided to take some morbid pictures with it as some sort of tourism fun. The tone immediately shifted when the kangaroo was revealed to still be alive. It kicked Charlie to the ground and hopped off with the jacket and the money.

The rest of Kangaroo Jack would be devoted to Charlie and Louis trying to find the money before  Mr. Smith could kill them for not delivering it, as well as Frankie travelling to Australia to try and smooth things over with Mr. Smith. There were still three notable portions of the film that helped to highlight the strange mixture of tones, but the overall story no longer needs to be described to understand these elements.

The first was the introduction of a romantic interest into the story. There was a woman working in the outback. Jessie (Estella Warren) was a wildlife expert trying to keep the animals alive and safe in the Australian wilderness. For the most part, she played the straight role to the goofy comedy of the Charlie and Louis pairing. She grounded their jokes so that they worked better when both men became unhinged lunatics. That worked well for the childish comedy of Kangaroo Jack.

When it came to the adult stuff, however, things got a little more explicit. There were a lot of leering shots on her body. Her first meeting with Charlie involved him thinking she was a mirage and grabbing her breasts. Later, there was a scene in which she bathed in some sort of a spring or pond, and Charlie watched as her wet clothing hung around her body, accentuating her boobs and her ass. The final scene showed that she had given up her wildlife job to always hang out on Charlie’s boat wearing nothing more than a white shirt that got soaked when Louis cannonballed into a hot tub. The sexualization of Jessie might not be something that kids would notice, but it was blatantly there, fighting against the child demographic that the movie tried to have.

One of the other strange scenes in Kangaroo Jack involved Charlie and Louis hiring a drunk pilot to help them track down Jackie Legs from the air. Louis had a tranquilizer gun that he was going to shoot at the kangaroo to incapacitate it while the pair retrieved their jacket and envelope of money. This would be a goofy enough scene if it was simply an erratic pilot flying dangerously while the pair of buffoons tried to track down the kangaroo. Yet the movie decided to add the idea of the pilot still being drunk into the mix. They mentioned having to wake him up with a mixture of coffee and Red Bull. They accidentally shot him with the tranquilizer, thus making his drunken piloting come to full, dangerous potential. It was essentially making light of drunk driving, which was a weird stance.

The final twist of Kangaroo Jack was what really nailed the poorly mixed tones. The entire movie was essentially playing with childish, slapstick comedy while telling a black comedy mob story. When all three sides of the conflict met up (Louis/Charlie, Mr. Smith, and Frankie), it was revealed that the fifty thousand dollars that Charlie and Louis were delivering was a payment for Mr. Smith to kill them. They were delivering payment for their own hit. The entire movie was about Charlie and Louis trying to retrieve money to pay for themselves to be killed. That was a dark premise for a movie that featured scenes of a kangaroo rapping and eating hot candy. The twist was also countered by Charlie mentioning that they’d be dead if it weren’t for Louis’s lucky jacket being stolen by a kangaroo. Serious stakes, silly story elements.

Kangaroo Jack was a movie with two tones. It was an adult, dark comedy premise that featured the mob, lost money, death threats, and a potential hit job. There was sexuality and drunk driving. But the story was given a childish, slapstick comedy polish. The adult content was paired up with a cute kangaroo doing cute kangaroo things. It was set alongside a dog sliding through a turning truck. The dark humour was countered with jokes about a guy seeing a mirage of a Jeep filled with Slurpees and getting brain freeze. Every dark comedy moment had a slapstick comedy moment to go with it. It was a movie filled with competing tones. Neither one won out and they never blended in a cohesive way. Kangaroo Jack was left a mess.

It can be tough to find the right mixture of two tones for a movie. Horror comedies frequently find it challenging to balance the horror and the comedy without sacrificing one for the other. The same could be said for comedies that straddle the line of two different comedic styles. If those two types of comedy don’t fit together, the entire movie will feel like some sort of abomination. It won’t be fluid. It won’t be entertaining. It won’t be good. The two tones will fight against one another, putting off audiences in the process.

That can become much more apparent when one style of comedy is directed at adults and the other is directed at children. In one moment, the movie becomes too adult for the children. In the next moment, it becomes too childish for adults. The two never fit together in a way that properly targets both audience demographics. The blending of tones is a tough line to straddle. Many screenwriters and directors fall to one side or the other. The few that manage to straddle it find success. The others, not so much.

Now for a few notes:

• Kangaroo Jack was suggested by @koalainchicago, who previously suggested View from the Top (week 83) and Snow Dogs (week 322).
• Christopher Walken appeared in Kangaroo Jack. It was his fourth movie in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. The other three were Gigli (week 225), Nine Lives (week 228), and Balls of Fury (week 349).
• Kangaroo Jack was the third Sunday “Bad” Movie to feature Michael Shannon, who was also in Jonah Hex (week 249) and Pottersville (week 316).
• Marton Csokas and Chris Sullivan were both featured in Timeline (week 222) before Kangaroo Jack.
• Lara Cox reappeared in Kangaroo Jack after showing up in The Marine 2 (week 30).
• It was also a long time between Sunday “Bad” Movies for Anthony Anderson, who had first shown up in Exit Wounds (week 93).
• Finally, Brian Casey was in both Gigli (week 225) and Kangaroo Jack.
• Have you seen Kangaroo Jack? What did you think of it? Were the conflicting tones one of the major factors in the movie not being great, or am I overreacting? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• You can find me on Twitter or in the comments if you have any suggestions for movies I should be watching. I’m currently working on the next chunk of the schedule and appreciate any and all insight into movies that I don’t already know about.
• One final note about the Twitter account. I’m currently holding a tournament to determine which of the movies covered in year 8 of the Sunday “Bad” Movies will get rewatched for the anniversary. Go to Twitter to vote and make sure the one you want moves forward.
• Head on over to Instagram, where I’m always trying to find some fun Sunday “Bad” Movies related things to post.
• And now for a preview of what will be coming up in a week’s time. I’ve got a quick little dip into a horror comedy. Andreas Samuelson messaged me a while back to say that I should check out his flick Housewife Alien vs. Gay Zombie. I thought “Why not?” and looked for a place to fit it into the schedule. With the new James Bond flick being pushed back again, it meant I could shift a related movie. That also meant that next week was open, so I slid Andreas’s movie into that empty spot. I’ll be checking out Housewife Alien vs. Gay Zombie for next week’s post. I hope you’ll come see what I had to say about it.