In his first significant film role in more than a decade, Paul Hogan hobbles back on to screens in The Very Excellent Mr Dundee, looking and behaving like a bewildered dinosaur from a distant era – his career forged in a time of yore long before the existence of terms such as “cancel culture” or even “the internet”.

This is not a ribbing of the legendary comedian on the basis of his age (Hogan is now 80) but rather something the film – directed by the longtime Hogan collaborator Dean Murphy – constantly leans into.

In the tradition of the Crocodile Dundee movies, which plucked a rough-as-guts rube out of rural Australia and dropped him into metropolitan America, this meta-ish sort-of sequel constructs a fish-out-of-water premise, the crux of the comedy resting on temporal rather than locational displacement: Hogan is the aquatic craniate and the passing of time the rocky seas on which he has been tossed and flailed, washing up on the beach of a modern, culturally conscientious world.

Skipping cinemas due to the pandemic and landing on Prime Video this week, the film (written by Murphy and Robert Mond) is about Hogan attempting to avoid “getting into trouble” (the writers are caught between viewing him with reverence and treating him like a child) after being awarded a knighthood for outstanding services to comedy. Despite being a decent bloke trying to mind his own business, you see, Hoges accidentally puts his foot in it everywhere he goes.

In the film’s mildly amusing opening sequence this involves animal and sight gags – with Hogan, weak-kneed at the sight of a snake, accidentally tossing it into the face of a primary school teacher. But then the comedy gets political. The veteran performer agrees to meet with movie producers on a studio lot, who serve him a large green smoothie with mint, goat’s milk and activated walnuts – not realising the true-blue veteran would prefer something more Hogan-like, such as a Fosters and a durrie.

The movie executives – one of them bobbing around on an exercise ball, because trendy – beg him to consider green-lighting another Crocodile Dundee sequel. They say they have the perfect star in mind to play his son: Will Smith. Hoges isn’t keen, the joke being that these modish woke people can’t understand why casting Smith might cause plausibility issues. This agonisingly stretched-out sequence culminates with Hogan exclaiming, “He’s black!” Murphy then cuts to the star walking away while his manager over the phone yells, “You can’t say that!”

So there we have it. In a year of surprises, here’s another to add to the tally: the new Dundee is a social and political commentary, with a core message that the modern world can no longer see the forest of good old-fashioned comedy for the trees of political correctness.

It took four films and more than three decades but the Crocodile Dundee series now, finally, has something substantial on its mind. Elements of The Very Excellent Mr Dundee feel like a repudiation of an opinion piece I wrote a couple of years ago, savaging aspects of the original movies – such as their blaringly obvious instances of sexism, racism and transphobia. At one point a news announcer in the new film refers to Hogan as a “disgraced racist, nun basher and former Australian legend”.

The most interesting thing about it arises from Murphy and Mond’s awareness that the humour in the original movies wouldn’t fly today. Their determination to still in some way “go there” provides a mild kind of edginess, with sometimes embarrassing results (like that clanger of a Will Smith joke).

Constantly painting Hogan as a victim of the modern world becomes a drag, though the film has notes of pathos that took me by surprise. Murphy makes the point that fame and fortune do not necessarily lead to happiness, a well-flogged but still salient message manifesting in Hogan’s hangdog visage and Eeyore-like demeanour. The passing of time has made the star softer and more pitiable; his deflated performance is not without its charms.

There are occasional, reasonably funny moments, including Hogan accosting a terrible Dundee impersonator (Shane Jacobson) who has butchered his “that’s not a knife” gag. The point is made that time turns legends into distortions, increasingly divorced from their origins: a key theme in the great theatre production Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play, and explored more frivolously in 1993’s Yahoo Serious comedy Reckless Kelly, which also contemplates celebrity culture and Australian legends.

The wobbly pace of The Very Excellent Mr Dundee is peppered up by celebrity cameos from the likes of Chevy Chase, Olivia Newton-John and John Cleese. There’s an ongoing joke about how well-loved Chase is, which seems to be an ironic acknowledgement of his less-than-honourable reputation, though the writers’ intention remains unclear and this thread comes across as toothless. The script eventually gorges on the kind of overblown sentimentality that has haunted Murphy’s previous films, including Strange Bedfellows and Charlie & Boots.

Some jokes feel like witnessing a slo-mo train crash but the humour at least has awareness: of itself; of the society to which it belongs; of a world that has (whether Hogan et al like it or not) moved on from the crudeness of its antecedents. Compare that to Hogan inspecting a hotel bidet and grabbing the groin area of a trans woman in the original movie and you get a more interesting (certainly less offensive) perspective. You wouldn’t want to overstate the film’s achievements, given that a lot of it comes across as weird, self-pitying flapdoodle. But this is, as they say, progress of a kind.

• The Very Excellent Mr Dundee is streaming now on Amazon Prime