MovieChat Forums > Kangaroo Jack (2003) Discussion > It's official: Bruckheimer has gone mad ...

It's official: Bruckheimer has gone mad with power

posted 22 years ago by filmbuff-36
14 replies | jump to latest

After years of making crappy movies that still manage to bring in major loads of cash, Bruckheimer has gone mental and now thinks himself another Steven Spielberg (i.e. Can produce either action or kiddie films at will).

And poor Jerry O'Connell. He seems to be trying to distance himself from that awful Tomcats movie he did last year but going the safe route and doing harmless childrens' movies. Too bad nobody told him he's too late. Free Willy was the last truly good movie of this type. Jerry, you had your shot at kid films back in the 80s with Stand By Me, but now it's time to grow up!

Kangaroo Jack doesn't look any better or worse than most kid films that get released nowadays. And I must admit, to my everlasting shame, I actually cracked a smile when Jack started rapping at the end of the trailer.

[–] HPeep 22 years ago

This is one of the many reasons why I think Hollywood isn't a good system. The number 1 reason is that Japan could make a better animated movie for 1/10th of the budget we make them. Compare Metropolis' $15 million budget to Treasure Planet's $110-150 million budget. Oh, and Hollywood thinks that Rob Schnieder is funny *shudders*.

PLEASE CHECK OUT MY NAUSICAA MESSAGE BOARD.

[–] filmbuff-36 22 years ago

Well, the biggest problem with movies like this is that the producer (Jerry Bruckheimer in this case) believes himself to be invincable, and that anything with his name stapled on it will become box office gold. It's not a question of how much money you pump into a film, it's what the plot involves. I wouldn't care if this movie was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Joel Silver or Roger Corman; it looks stupid no matter who makes it.

Bruckheimer isn't a complete lost cause; I enjoyed The Rock and Black Hawk Down, but most of his films are empty, Mtv generation action fluff. The fact that he pumps his movie soundtracks full of chart topping pop hits only solidifies this theory. Kangaroo Jack looks like it will be no different.

Whatever merits this film might have will be overshadowed by the obvious fact that it's just a cheesy B-movie timefiller. It's large budget doesn't disguise this; at worst, it makes it all the more blatant. And besides, the plot is based loosely on a stupid urban legend (http://www.snopes.com/critters/malice/kangaroo.htm), so really, what does that tell you?

[–] LittleMiso 22 years ago

That's right. And what did Treasure Planet's budget get wasted on? ADVERTISING! and what would have been a better thing to advertise? Miyazaki's Spirited Away of course.

Treasure Planet just did it wrong. I mean a "cool skateboard" aimed to attract teens, yet fart jokes to attract a seven-year-old. Not a good combonation.

Hollywood's only saving cause now are big-name-actors/directors/writers/whatever and those stupid Academy Awards that people strangely pay attention to.

Metropolis only needed a $15 million budget to make a great movie.
Treasure Planet needed a $100 million budget and IT SUCKED.

Rob Schneider's movies are just as unfunny as Adam Sandler's. Both of them seriously need to get back at SNL (Saturday Night Live) and actually have people tell them what's funny or not, not hollywood.

Hollywood sucks. Get yourself some foreign or independent flicks instead.

Oh yeah, and you don't need big budget and special effects to make a good movie. Try out "Twister" and the special effects were the only good value, and to me, that's not enough. Probably spending all their budget to make the stupid wind storm look right. Geez, the dumb ways people spend money.

Kevin Smith's "Clerks" only needed a $27,000 budget, and that was one of the funniest movies ever made, better than anything Hollywood's ever released. (Okay, watch "Singin' in the Rain". Now, what do you see in there, besides the fact that it has to be one of the best movies ever released, maybe one of Hollywood's last hurrahs. Well, brats screaming and yelling at a major studio premire at the Chinese theater in hollywood for two movie stars to arrive. And the audience just enjoyed it when that talkie premiere failed)

Face it, Hollywood's crashing down. One brick at a time. When all of those fall, Hollywood will die, and independent film will take its rise!

Also, "The Blair Witch Project" is a thousand times better than Hollywood's sucky remakes of horror films that are ALREADY GOOD. (All Thir13een Ghosts had was that stupid number in the Thir13een. Se7en, an independent film, had so much more than that) Appearently, Hollywood isn't paying attention to that old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Shyeah, and they thought they could make ROLLERBALL better. No, they just made it a whole lot worse. Okay, it is the same as the old one... except for the fact that it had no plot, a figure-eight rink (which sucked), all these rules that turned the beat-each-other's-ass-down-so-you-can-get-the-ball turned into i'm-a-tree-hugging-peaceful-pussy-ball, people amazed by blood (just like it's so suprising how many people were amazed at that "Gladiator" crap), and then the random sex scenes. Which, pretty much, is a disgrace to James Caan and all the other people who worked on the original, and the author of the original short story.

Why do I watch hollywood flicks anyways? Because I wanna laugh at how much THEY SUCK!

[–] filmbuff-36 22 years ago

I have to agree, for the most part. I'm not a proponant of ditching American cinema and running off to watch foreign movies (personally, I think foreign films can suck as much as anything made here), but the Hollywood cookie cutter is running out of steam.

The best horror movies of the last 25 years have been independant films. Halloween, Phantasm, The Evil Dead, and The Blair Witch Project all succeeded because they were free of big studio interference (all their sequels, on the other hand...)

Oh, and yes, after wasting my money on that atrocious film Eight Crazy Nights, I am now convinced that Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider both stink.

Hopefully Kangaroo Jack will bomb, and people will return to watching good movies, like The Godfather, or The Lion King, or something.

Kevin Smith forever!

[–] 22 years ago

[deleted]

[–] HPeep 22 years ago

My favorite genre is and always will be anime. The "anti-Hollywood" that always delivers something good (minus Ninja Ressurection, MD Geist, and some adult titles). They cost ten times less and are aprox. 100 times better than your standard Hollywood flick. Watch anime and let it change your life. Don't get stuck watching this crap.

[–] LittleMiso 22 years ago

The Godfather is really overrated. Although I think it's good, I still don't think it should have been in the iMDB Top 10, rather could be somewhere in the top 50.

Hollywood's only about big-name actors, big-budget and big special effects. But so what?! Like THOSE make something a good movie? Stanley Kubrick's 2001, true, had a big budget and had lots of visuals that were purely eye candy. But you know what's the difference? 2001 actually had room left for a plot, and they worried about special effects AFTER they wrote the screenplay for the film, not otherways (*cough*Twister*cough)

Can't you tell I hate the movie Twister? Worse than Ishtar, IMO. But Kangaroo Jack will always be on my bottom 10.

Spider-Man was good, though, because this time, they didn't mangle it like "Batman and Robin". and there was much more than special effects. And it's one of the better films from Hollywood, possibly a last hurrah.

Goodbye Hollywood, I regret EVER paying attention to you!

[–] HPeep 22 years ago

Godfather I like a lot (though it's not my favorite). Batman and Robin is simply one of the worst movies ever made. Spider-Man I like to think of as a popcorn flick, predictable but a whole lot of fun. And Hollywood in general. YECH! Watch something by Kurosawa or Bergman but not the crap Hollywood is churning out.

[–] mgbesq 22 years ago

All of you who are huge proponants of independent film need to go to a film festival sometime. If you think Hollywood churns out crap, you wouldn't believe what you see at SXSW or Sundance. The fact of the matter is for every 1 good indie, there's 1000 horrible indies that you never get to see. Same goes for foreign films and anime. ADV films isn't going to waste the time importing and translating everything that gets sent over from Japan, only the best. So to compare the worst Hollywood offerings to the best of another system is ridiculous. You people need to relax. They're just movies. If you don't want to see them, then don't go. If you do go, try to have an open mind rather than, "There's no way this is going to be better than 'Evil Dead' or 'Bubblegum Crisis.'" And if you REALLY don't like the way movies are going, then shut up and make your own. It's really that easy.

[–] h0bkn0b 22 years ago

Hey mgbesq,
That's true, but...there are also a lotta good indie films that never make it overseas and if you live somewhere in the world with a movie theatre you can just about guarantee you're going to be bombarded by Hollywood fare (good & crap) - often killing local product (like here in Oz - both in terms of exhibition and production). There's commercial cronyism in them thar distribution practices. Hollywood has more money than anyone else so they can do all this stuff & get away with behaving badly. That's some of the reasons why I'm a proponent of indie over Hollywood. (That Matrix film though, that was awwwwwesome - yeah?)

[–] klantry 22 years ago

From "THE BIG PICTURE: How 'Jack' hopped away with a PG rating ", by Patrick Goldstein, The Los Angeles Times, 1/28/2003

The film was shot in early 2001 in Australia. In keeping with its slick action tone, Bruckheimer hired director David McNally, who'd made "Coyote Ugly," a Bruckheimer movie about an aspiring songwriter who lands a job as a dancing sex kitten in a nightclub. When the film was initially cut together, it was obvious that the kangaroo footage, using a mechanically operated animatronic kangaroo, didn't work. Neither did the film. However, looking at the early test screening results, Bruckheimer saw a ray of hope. There was one character that younger kids loved -- the kangaroo.

When the producer went to a test screening of the film last January with Warner Bros. Chairman Alan Horn, he saw posters everywhere for a new Disney film, "Snow Dogs." Rated PG and aimed at kids, "Snow Dogs" was an instant hit, buoyed by a TV ad campaign that led audiences to believe that the dogs talked, which they did in only one brief scene.

Voila! "I told Alan, 'Let's make the kangaroo talk,' " Bruckheimer recalls. "We did a dream sequence where he raps, we changed the title to 'Kangaroo Jack' and we made it much more kid- friendly all around." Suddenly a hip mob comedy was an adorable kangaroo picture. Warner Bros. ended up spending an extra $10 million to shoot additional footage and replace its animatronic kangaroos with computer-generated kangaroo characters. Not every studio would've been willing to risk throwing good money after bad, but Warner Bros. was betting on Bruckheimer's commercial instincts and was eager to keep him happy, since his Warner Bros.-produced TV show, "CSI," is a huge moneymaker for the studio.

Last summer, after the computer effects were completed, Warner Bros. had a new "Kangaroo Jack" test screening. "It went through the roof," Bruckheimer says. "It was the biggest change in test screening numbers in Warners history." When the studio submitted the film to the MPAA for a PG rating, it was initially rejected. So Bruckheimer cut out more footage, largely sequences with objectionable language or sexual innuendo. When the film was resubmitted, it got its vital PG rating, even though the testicle joke and breast grope remained. I asked the MPAA to explain its decision but, as always, the ultra-secretive organization refused to discuss any specific ratings. In fact, Bruckheimer says that when parents at another screening objected to a couple of mildly vulgar words like "ass," he cut them out of the picture, "even though the MPAA hadn't asked us to."

In keeping with the "Snow Dogs" model, Warners put the film's kid- friendly kangaroo front and center in its ads, releasing the film on Jan. 17, the same date that "Snow Dogs" opened last year. Asked if it wasn't misleading to run TV spots with a talking kangaroo when the kangaroo barely talks in the actual film, Warner Bros. marketing chief Dawn Taubin explained: "There's clearly a lot of kangaroo in the movie. And our exit polls indicated very strongly that a large percentage of the audience were highly satisfied with the movie."

"Well, there it is."

[–] filmbuff-36 22 years ago

Just goes to show that many people will not leave well enough alone and just drop an awful project instead of trying to repackage it. The only other movie I can think of like this is the horrible 2000 sci-fi horror pic Supernova that went through 3 directors (Walter Hill, Jack Sholder and Francis Ford Coppola, all of whom I like!) Like Kangaroo Jack, it was dumped in January. Unlike Kangaroo Jack however, it faded blissfully from memory.

Oh well, I guess it's a sad testiment that Jerry Bruckheimer knows how to properly market schlock.

[–] themadmoviemathew 22 years ago

I hope this is not an example of how Pirates of the Caribbean is like. Yuck! By the way, my friend wants to see this (he was the only one who enjoyed the trailer) and asked does the kangaroo talk apart from in a rap scene. Could you help?

[–] filmbuff-36 17 years ago

Dang, this is my oldest post on IMDb. Does it still hold up?

Yes, yes it does. This movie proved to be awesomely bad, in all the ways a bad movie can fail. And of course, it's also bad in the one unforgivable realm: it's forgettable. It seems there's a new bad children's movie every year, in the end, Kangaroo Jack wasn't even noteworthy bad movie. It just came along, made some money, and disappeared. The End.