4/10
Almost completely devoid of even the slightest amusement
7 February 2009
I never was an avid viewer of "Crocodile Hunter", but did occasionally see an episode, or a bit of an episode, and when the news spread about Steve Irwin's death from a stingray attack in 2006, it certainly caught my attention. This movie, with Steve and his wife, Terri, playing themselves, but in a fictional story, was released in 2002, but I didn't hear of it until several years later, and even after that, it took me a while to get around to seeing it. Well, now I have seen it, and after looking here first (more than once), and seeing its rating, I was not surprised at how unimpressive it turned out to be, though it could have been a BIT better. Apparently, it's supposed to be a comedy, so a major problem with it is that it isn't very funny at all.

A U.S. satellite beacon falls down from space and lands in Australia, where it is swallowed by a crocodile! While Steve and Terri Irwin are on a mission to capture this crocodile from a place where it terrorizes the cattle on a ranch owned by the crazy Brozzie Drewitt, and are unaware of what's inside it, two CIA agents are sent to Australia to retrieve the beacon! The agents are assisted by Jo Buckley, and the ranch owner and her dogs might make the mission more difficult for them! On Steve and Terri's mission, they face other types of dangerous wildlife, not just the crocodile, and since they have no clue that the croc has anything unusual inside it, when Steve sees the CIA agents after them, he mistakes them for poachers!

Not only did I not laugh once while watching this film, the only part that really made me smile was Steve Irwin using a big snake to scare off one of the CIA agents. Apart from that, I don't think I found anything even mildly amusing. It's also a bit of an incoherent mess, switching back and forth from the Australian Outback to the CIA headquarters, and it seems like clips from "Crocodile Hunter" and clips from an action thriller (or something like that) put together for some reason. Also added to that mix are the ranch scenes, which also seem to be from somewhere else, and as funny as Brozzie Drewitt, played by Magda Szubanski, is supposed to be, she's not. At one point, we see her farting, so we have a fart joke, a MAJOR cliché in modern comedy! Are they SO hard to resist?! I also found the typical "Crocodile Hunter" scenes, with Steve wrestling crocodiles and holding other dangerous creatures and talking about them to viewers, to be tedious, but I guess the fact that I was never a devout fan of the show didn't help.

Steve Irwin was admired by many as a conservationist, and is sadly missed by them, while there are also those who say he messed with nature and had it coming to him. No matter which side you're on, "The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course" is not a well crafted movie. I'm sure it does help if you're a big Steve Irwin fan, but even if you are, there's no guarantee that you would like this movie, as some fans clearly haven't been impressed. In fact, it seems that some of them have found this movie to be worse than I have, so maybe it WON'T help. Like I said, there's no guarantee. I would say whatever you may think of Steve Irwin and his show, this movie was unnecessary. The attempt to combine what is usually seen in "Crocodile Hunter" with a fictional story unfortunately failed, and a viewer may find that this film seems longer than ninety minutes!
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