Crocodile Dundee II (1988)

After the success of Crocodile Dundee, it was probably a no-brainer that a sequel would be given the greenlight. And it came along two years later. A lot of the main players return, but the main twist on the material this time around is that the fish out of water main character returns to settle back in his own pond for a while.

Mick Dundee (Paul Hogan) is living happily with his partner, Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski), in New York. He still has his quirks, of course, but he seems nice and settled. But all that changes when Sue's ex-husband photographs a drug cartel killing someone and sends the photographs to Sue. That makes Sue a target, which makes Mick think that she might be safer if they head back to Australia and lay low for a while. The baddies follow, sorely underestimating the fact that Mick is even more of a force to be reckoned with when he's on his home turf.

The fact that this was made so soon after the first film, and has Hogan so easily slipping back into his character, ends up being a big plus for the film. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds comfort and contentment at times, and this is what you will get here if you enjoyed the first film. What you won't get, however, are many laughs. It's a shame that when Paul and Brett Hogan wrote the script for this outing they forgot to keep the laughs going along with the chase/thriller scenario. Not that the whole thing is laugh-free. It's just that most of the jokes are minor ones, and a bit too few and far between.

The direction by John Cornell is exactly the same as his direction on the first film, there are some nice shots of Australia, and he soundtrack has one tune that I enjoy on it - Real Wild Child (Wild One), performed by Iggy Pop.

Hogan and Kozlowski pair up better here than they did in the first film, mainly thanks to the latter not now having to show her being won over by the former's rough charm. John Meillon has good fun reprising his role (Walter), and he gets some more screentime thanks to his character being grabbed by the cartel as someone they think may help them catch Mick. Hechter Ubarry and Juan Fernandez are stereotypical cartel villains, and they feel like a real threat at times, while the rest of the supporting cast doesn't boast too many familiar faces, with the exception of a young-ish Luis Guzman and Charles S. Dutton being involved for all of five minutes.

It's admirable that the film at least tried to do something different with the characters in this instalment. Everyone involved could have easily just transported Mick to another area (the UK, for example) and allowed him to have another bunch of misunderstandings. They didn't. Although it wouldn't stop them returning to that well thirteen years later, when we got Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles.

5/10

Buy a double-bill here.
And Americans can pick it up here.

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989)

Charles Bronson is a tough guy, once again, in this piece of sleazy nastiness from director J. Lee Thompson. Of course, Bronson was always a tough guy in pretty much everything he did so, don't worry, I'll give you a bit more about his situation this time around.

Bronson is a cop who can't seem to pin anything on horrible uber-pimp Duke (Juan Fernandez). Duke specializes in little girls for his clients, which leads to Bronson specializing in making Duke's life as difficult as possible. It's not all by the book. In fact, it's about as far from the book as you can get. The clock starts to tick faster when a Japanese businessman (James Pax) turns to the police when his young daughter is kidnapped. The distraught father also has a few peccadilloes of his own, and Bronson may not be too happy about helping him if he finds out just what he's been up to since arriving in America.

Written by Harold Nebenzal, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is, in many ways, standard Bronson fare, yet it's also a bit different. His character is forced, albeit momentarily, to question how his mind works when he's not on the job, to consider the damage done and the huge difference between his own view of the world and the view that others can take. There are times when this creeps into territory covered by the likes of Tightrope and The Offence. And then there are times when Bronson forces someone to eat a watch.

Director J. Lee Thompson is well known for a filmography that's pretty loaded with testosterone, and he worked with Bronson on a number of movies before this one (this was their last film together), so viewers shouldn't have been TOO surprised by the end result this time around. It may have some extra unpleasantness, but it's still all about Bronson doing a good job where the system falls down.

Bronson is fine in the lead role, whether he's aggressively scaring pimps and crooks or going off on a bizarre racist rant aimed at numerous Japanese people he views as pesky interlopers, at one point. Fernandez is suitably loathsome as Duke, and Pax is, arguably, one of the more interesting characters to be placed in a movie like this. It's made clear that he's not the nicest guy ever, especially in the way that he treats his wife, but he's also not demonised for his actions, despite the one main sequence that sees him sliding from relatively harmless thoughts of his fantasties to grossly inappropriate real actions. Peggy Lipton and Amy Hathaway are just fine as the women in Bronson's life, Perry Lopez does well enough as Eddie Rios, Sy Richardson is a bad man who works with Duke, and fans of Nicole Eggert will be pleased to see her in a relatively early role.

It might leave you wanting to take a shower as the end credits roll, but this is another fine piece of Bronson-led machismo for those who like such fare. And I count myself among that demographic nowadays.

7/10

http://www.amazon.com/10-Midnight-Kinjite-Charles-Bronson/dp/B008FYZIZK/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1405919498&sr=1-1&keywords=kinjite