Buy it... only if you feel a need to purchase the last of Basil Poledouris' new commercial albums released before cancer restricted his mainstream career and ultimately led to his death five years later.

Avoid it... if you expect either Peter Best's material from the previous two films or a compelling merging of jungle percussion with American rock tones.

Poledouris

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles: (Basil Poledouris) It's just so pathetic to see a perfectly good concept dragged through the mud for absolutely no acceptable reason whatsoever. While the 1988 sequel to 1986's Crocodile Dundee was at least understandable in terms of revisiting a funny character for one last blast, Paramount decided to haul Paul Hogan (who had claimed he would never do a third film in this franchise) out for a wretchedly awful 2001 follow-up. With the original two films seeming like they belonged to another generation, perhaps there was enough nostalgia left in the tank to justify a really good script for Hogan to wrestle with. But Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles is downright horrible, failing to provide any compelling connections to the previous film and trying far too hard to resurrect laughs from previous situations in which Hogan was out of place. It was difficult not to be acquainted with the cute legacy of the Crocodile Dundee franchise even that far removed from its origins, especially with Hogan doing so many commercials for substandard vehicles (even in his advancing years), so it should have come as no surprise that the soundtrack for the third entry was not to be taken seriously. The first two films in the series were provided catchy scores by Peter Best, and though neither effort was particularly good, some critics complained about not hearing his music in Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. Composer Basil Poledouris' involvement with the film instead surely began with his relationship with director Simon Wincer, with whom he had collaborated on Lonesome Dove (which some still consider one of his best works). No doubt, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles offered more than just a small paycheck for Poledouris, likely attributable to a "sounds like fun" motivation as well. After all, how many composers get the opportunity to score an entry in such a previously intelligent and illustrious film franchise? Unfortunately, this project arguably represented the end of the increasingly ill composer's career. Poledouris' assignments of the previous three years had all been of a smaller scale, avoiding the typical blockbuster assignments that the veteran composer was best known for.

His health and his personal life in shambles, Poledouris had relocated to Seattle and also established a state of the art studio in Venice, Italy. Both moves ultimately came too late to turn around his career before he lost his battle with cancer in 2006. While he did manage to write and record for a couple of projects after 2001, it's a shame that the ridiculous Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles is technically his final mainstream work. Aggravating that circumstance was the fact that the new century had only yielded three Poledouris scores to that point, with the pleasant Kimberly and uninteresting Love and Treason scores failing to turn many heads. This second entry in 2001 is a score that proved to irritate his fans rather than reverse that downward trend. For the task of scoring of Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, Poledouris was given a sum of money just large enough to incorporate fifteen or so minutes of combined orchestral performances in Seattle, and the rest of the material was his responsibility (along with his fellow producers from Love and Treason) to piece together back at his studios in Venice. Ironically, the only redeeming parts of his score don't involve the orchestra much at all; they are the performances by acoustic guitars at the beginning and end of the work. The "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles - Main Title" and "Proposal/Wedding Day" sequences have the most coherent musical attributes, with a simplistic theme that, with the help of the orchestra's string section, actually produces a Poledouris-style sound consistent with his other modern scores. The rest of the score is handled with percussive and electronic samples that are nothing short of tedious to hear for any great length of time, attempting to merge the hip coolness of American rock tones with a twist of the jungle. That jungle element, formally the Australian influence on the score, is carried by acoustic guitar and is intentionally meant to conflict with the rock portions representing America because of the needed culture clash in the story. Unfortunately, this alternation, from the bizarre rattling and plucking of the straight Australian sequences (which are usually animal-related, not surprisingly) to the rhythmically unpredictable electric guitars and their drums, causes a juxtaposition that just doesn't work.

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What is funny in the movie is difficult to tolerate on album, and that can sometimes happen on score albums that accompany slapstick films of lower intelligence. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles is not the worst case of a parody or slapstick score, but it is still impossible to appreciate given its obvious limitations. The constant switching of percussive tone in nearly every cue causes an extremely fragmented personality for the entire work, especially by the time the wailing electric guitars have overwhelmed the jungle atmosphere that started to form a cohesive sound early on. At least the sound quality from Blowtorch Flats in Venice is significantly better here than it had been in the usually muffled Love and Treason. The fact that any mostly score-related album existed for this soundtrack was surprising at the time. It represents a rare occasion when the main attraction of the product is indeed the selection of songs rather than the score material ("blasphemy!" you say? Well, no). The addictive "Down Under" song by Men at Work is what 95% of all purchasers of this product will be seeking, and it's the basic reason the album existed in stores to begin with. Why it wasn't placed at the start is a mystery; its personality fits Hogan so much better than the weak underscore. The other songs are all decent, and one can only wonder why Silva didn't jettison more of the score material by Poledouris to accommodate additional songs that could have better financially boosted the label (which was pushing the songs in its publicity tactics and nearly ignoring the Poledouris majority on the album). That said, the two aforementioned, bookending score cues could easily have been mixed into a satisfying 6-minute suite of Poledouris' contribution to the film, releasing the rest of the product for a potentially more lucratively marketable collection of Australian flavored songs. As it stands, the Poledouris collectors aren't going to be thrilled by this barely listenable score, and people who buy the album for the four songs won't be thrilled to have to sift through the twelve tracks of score in order to get to what they want. All around, the album is a mismatch, and for film music enthusiasts, one to avoid all together. To say all this about the last of Poledouris' new commercial score albums in America before his death is painful and frustrating, but it's hard, cold truth. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Basil Poledouris reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.47 (in 33 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.27 (in 32,977 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.