After watching Kangaroo Jack, I left the theater in a daze. I don't think I've seen anything so meaningless in a long time. And yes, I did see Just Married last week, although that movie felt more like squandered potential. Kangaroo Jack, on the other hand, has no potential to be anything other than a bad movie. It really has no reason to exist.

Think about it -- where could you go with this premise? Two guys sent to Australia to deliver a lot of money lose it to a kangaroo, an animal they desperately hunt in order to recover the cash. A typical chase comedy might result, but the object of pursuit can't do anything to make the situations funny. It's a kangaroo! What can the creature do other than  hop away? One might offer up the Looney Tunes' Road Runner/Coyote cartoons as an example of how to make that work, but think about it a bit more. The Road Runner makes the comedy successful because he always zips by the Coyote, constantly just out of his reach, usually triggering the disaster that befalls the Coyote during each gag.

Kangaroo Jack is too elusive, too hard to find to set up those kinds of jokes (in fact, the kangaroo appears only in short  and inconsequential scenes). So the movie falls back on the standard comic buddy formula. Stop me if you've heard something like this before -- Jerry O'Connell is Charlie, the beleaguered straight man, and Anthony Anderson is Louis, his loud, overweight, spastic friend who always gets the pair into trouble. After their latest mishap, the local mob sends them to Australia with an envelope of cash to deliver. They screw up, find a wildlife-expert named Jessie (Estella Warren) to help them, and hijinks ensue, especially after the mob starts coming after them.

Kangaroo Jack delivers a parade of corny jokes, just in case the plot wasn't corny enough for us. The protagonists go to an Australian bar and cheer on a jolly old local guy who pounds down a load of beers before collapsing to the floor. The two heroes walk through the Aussie desert where Charlie is fooled into seeing a mirage; shortly afterward, Jessie finds them, but since Charlie thinks she must also be a mirage, he decides to enjoy this one by grabbing her breasts. Later, Charlie finds Jessie bathing (with her shirt on) under a light waterfall in a cavern-enclosed pond; he joins her, she protests, they kiss, they both say it meant nothing, then they kiss some more. He says it's a romantic moment, which is the cue for the fat guy to cannonball into the water.

Now read that paragraph again, but this time keep in mind that this movie is being marketed toward kids.

Did I mention there's a kangaroo in the movie? He's a cg-character, naturally, and looks like he should be the mascot of a kids' cereal. But the kangaroo could have been any critter as long as it could run away and be hard to catch. Why a kangaroo? Because then the movie could be set in Australia, and the filmmakers could throw in jokes about Australia -- greetings of "G'day mate!", natives speaking unintelligible English, songs about the land "down under," and dingo attacks. I think if I were Australian, I'd want to pull my hair out in disgust. Actually, I wanted to do that anyway.

Perhaps the biggest insult to Australia is how the filmmakers   refused to make even Jessie, the wildlife expert, Australian. Charlie and Louis are so relieved to find out she's an American. Never mind about trying to show kids the value of cultural exchange. In fact, never mind about showing the youngsters anything of value at all. When the biggest laughs  come from an extended sequence of riding flatulent camels and two scenes where Charlie gets kicked in the face by a kangaroo, you know including something substantive in Kangeroo Jack was the last thing its creators had on their minds. 

(Released by Warner Bros. and rated "PG" for language, crude humor, sensuality and violence.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.