![]() He left school age 15 and moved to northern Australia to turn his skills at pulling down beef cattle into catching water buffalo.Īnsell had just finished such a job near Kununurra in Western Australia's Kimberley region when he crossed the border into the Northern Territory to put a boat on the Victoria River. Rodney William Ansell was born in Queensland and grew up on a property in Murgon, about 270 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. That remarkable story of survival was relatively slow to reach the wider world but brought unwanted attention when it did.Īnsell's exploits became the subject of a book and film and later inspired Paul Hogan to invent Mick Dundee when he saw him interviewed by Michael Parkinson on TV. Short and wiry, Ansell stood out in the Top End with his blond hair, blue eyes and insistence on not wearing shoes.Īnsell's wider fame, which did not sit easily with this complicated loner, rested on eight weeks he spent as a 22-year-old stranded on a remote and crocodile-infested river. That all came to an end in a five-minute gun battle with cops at a roadblock an hour south of Darwin on August 3, 1999. In his 44 years Ansell had gone from buffalo catcher to movie star, talk show guest and one of the Northern Territory's most recognisable characters. The killer was carrying no identification but was soon revealed to be legendary barefoot bushman Rod Ansell, the original model for Crocodile Dundee. Twenty years ago police shot dead a drug-crazed gunman after he opened fire on them at an Outback roadblock and killed one of their colleagues. Every woman who comes into contact with a Real Man from the Outback all but swoons, until the movie is more like a love letter than a comedy.Rod Ansell was a blond-haired, blue-eyed bushman who almost never wore shoes Finally, the most annoying aspect of the movie is that it is not enough for Sue to adore Mick everyone else must, too. Even though she is only called upon to have one expression - bemused adoration - through most of the movie, it is more than those features can be called upon to produce. But Kozlowski has that botox-mask look, her features as frozen and sandblasted as one of the heads on Easter Island. Hogan, who is 61, has just had some of the crags removed. Another is the truly shocking plastic surgery on the main characters. One is the language, very strong for a PG movie, with a number of swear words and some "nice ass" remarks that are supposed to be charming or funny and fail at both. ![]() The talented Jere Burns is wasted as a generic bad guy.Īll of this would be pretty harmless, except for some aspects of the movie that are affirmatively annoying. And there is some silliness about a movie studio that intentionally makes terrible movies like "Lethal Agent III." I had hopes for a moment there of some "Producers-"like parody of shlocky movies, but what we got instead was a chase scene that, come to think of it, might be an outtake from one of those "Lethal Agent" movies after all. There are jokes that are older than the 61-year-old Hogan. We have a few scenes of Mick, Mikey, and fellow-croc-catcher Joe getting a kick out of the weirdness of Hollywood (George Hamilton recommends a coffee enema and Mike Tyson recommends meditation, Mick and Mikey go on a tram tour of a studio back lot and Mick stabs a fake anaconda). But they are lost in the swamp of a dumb script and lackluster direction. It starts with two strong assets: an engaging character already well known and fondly remembered from two previous movies and a city that is a big, juicy target for satire. You would think that a movie called CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES would just about make itself work. ![]()
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