By TeeJay Small
| Published
These days, movie trailers are commonly critiqued for leaving too much on the field, and giving away far too much of a film’s plot. It’s a common refrain among YouTube commenters that they need not see a movie at all once they’ve finished the trailer, since they’ve already been given the entire over-arching story, and most of the key jokes and plot twists. But one film from the early aughts was so egregious with its marketing that I genuinely believe the people responsible should be thrown in jail. The film in question is 2003’s Kangaroo Jack, which arguably holds the distinction of being one of my least favorite films of all time.
“Don’t Worry, We’ll Fix It In Post“
For those not in the know, Kangaroo Jack is a bizarre buddy crime comedy that was marketed as a PG adventure for kids and families. Apparently, the film was originally conceived (and completed) as an R-rated mob movie for adults, with a working title of Down and Under. Unfortunately, the movie tested so poorly with audiences that producer Jerry Bruckheimer considered shelving it entirely, never to be properly released. Rather than eating the cost of the failed film, Bruckheimer went to work in the editing suite, and remade the movie in post from the ground up.
Using what scraps he could salvage from the original production, Bruckheimer and company were able to sell Kangaroo Jack as a Looney Tunes style romp with a talking kangaroo who raps and bounces around in a boxing ring. They then leaned super heavily on this concept in trailers, posters, and virtually every other form of marketing. As a child, I genuinely believed I was coming home from Blockbuster Video with a silly Tom and Jerry style movie where a wily talking animal runs around the Outback outsmarting a couple of goofball humans, and winking toward the camera.
So imagine my surprise, and the surprise of every other 90’s kid, when Kangaroo Jack turned out to be the cinematic equivalent of a cryptocurrency rug-pull. In reality, the film centers on a pair of ultra-soft twenty-somethings named Charlie (Jerry O’Connell) and Louis (Anthony Anderson), who run a beauty salon. After getting mixed up with some mobsters, the pair agree to deliver a package to a criminal in Australia, where they eventually strike a red kangaroo with their rental car. Like a pair of absolute psychopaths, Charlie and Louis decide to play dress up and take keepsake photos with what they fully believe to be roadkill.
The kangaroo, who is absolutely just a normal kangaroo and not a talking, rapping, cartoon character, wakes up wearing Charlie’s jacket, and runs away with $50,000 in cash lining its pockets. The rest of the movie is a straightforward game of cat and mouse, where Charlie and Louis attempt to track down the hoodie-clad marsupial, and the mobsters trace their tracks in search of their missing money. The whole thing feels like a reimagining of the “Pine Barrens” episode of The Sopranos, if the writers were huffing paint thinner and the production budget was slashed by 85 percent.
A Disastrous Bait-And-Switch
Here’s where things go completely off the rails: midway through the film, Charlie is knocked unconscious, and he suffers a fever dream about the kangaroo. That completely inconsequential dream sequence is where 99 percent of the film’s marketing is pulled from. The talking kangaroo was a single-scene gimmick used to pad the runtime because half of the original movie was left on the cutting room floor. It was constructed entirely in post-production, and has absolutely no bearing on the plot of the film whatsoever.
If a restaurant attempted to pull a bait-and-switch of this magnitude, they would be shut down by the city within a week’s time. Part of me feels like Kangaroo Jack could have been interesting if it had been marketed appropriately, but I know that there’s essentially nothing special about this movie at all that the producers could have used to entice viewers. At the end of the day, this film commits the most cardinal sin possible: it’s boring. If it were at least so-bad-it’s-good like The Room or Birdemic, it would be worth revisiting for a laugh, but there’s really nothing funny about Kangaroo Jack unless you enjoy multi-million dollar corporations plucking cash from the pockets of honest moviegoers.
Currently, the film doesn’t seem to be streaming on any major platform. I say, good riddance, and I hope it gets lost to the annals of time. You could still rent Kangaroo Jack from digital retailers such as Apple TV+ and YouTube, but you could genuinely derive more enjoyment from setting $3.99 on fire in the middle of your living room. If you’re thinking about giving this one a spin, I would advise you to go outside and touch grass instead.
