Crikey, it appears that Steve Irwin has taken his successful Crocodile Hunter show that appears on Animal Planet and made a full-length feature film. Only to liven up the situation writer and director John Stainton put in a storyline with a plot to go along with the educational portion of this film. The animals are all real, including wrestling with that enormous crocodile. The scene with the bird eating spider, real spider, really lose in the vehicle, the baby kangaroo, also real, the kind snake dangling into the face of the rouge CIA agent dragging behind the truck, yes real snake. The lizard in the dirt, yep real and the crocs, yes they are Irwin’s croc’s from the Australian Zoo and they spend months setting up those scenes because a crocodile is not much of an actor, if he gets hold of you, well the movie is pretty much over. I was amazed at the time it took to shoot this picture, and the effort put in pretty much to deliver an educational message to people about respecting these amazing creatures. Irwin’s show on Animal Planet delivers the same message, but with a funny storyline the message gets driven home better.

The film begins with Irwin speaking to the camera as he does in his show, because he is filming his show. While we are watching Irwin, a satellite tracking drone falls from space and lands in Australia, and a nasty large crocodile eats it. Not a very safe or healthy food for the reptile. The CIA sends a couple of agents to recover this device. The guys are willing to kill or hurt innocent civilians to get what they want. Then another storyline that will intersect with the previous two is a farmer, Brozzie Drewitt (Magda Szubanski), who is having problems with a large crocodile on her land, so she is trying to kill it. Irwin is on the way to capture and release the reptile somewhere else. This is the same croc that ate the tracking device. Now Irwin thinks the agents are poachers, the agents think Irwin is a spy in possession of the tracking drone and they are on a race to, well each has their own agenda, Irwin to save the croc and the agents to get the drone and the farmer to be rid of the cantankerous crocodile.

The movie is silly, the farmer cartoonish in appearance and the storyline goofy. Still, it made for an entertaining picture. Also appearing in this film were Terri Irwin as herself, David Wenham (Moulin Rouge), Lacy Hulme, Aden Young, Kenneth Ransom, Steven Vidler (The Thin Red Line) and many more. I appreciated the stunts and how they really gave that crocodile a personality. This will never be a big box office hit, or even win awards, but the message Irwin was delivering hit a huge audience and entertained us as well. I give The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course seven couches out of ten on the About-movies scale.

Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:48:24 AM

Click Here to get back into frames.