Green Hornet – Movie Review

By: Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg (writers), Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz (starring), Michel Gondry (director)

The Story: With too much money and time on his hands, and not enough thrills, millionaire Britt Reid enlists the help of martial artist/genius/tech wiz/coffee maker Kato to take down LA’s biggest criminals under the guise of the Green Hornet.

SPOILER ALERT

The Review: From the beginning, it’s clear that Green Hornet is a mixed bag.  Story-wise, it adapts some of the elements of Kevin Smith’s comic miniseries by setting the period in the present and as the basis for Britt Reid’s character.  But the rest of the movie seems to be largely Rogen’s creation, resulting in the movie being deluged with the in-your-face kind of humor that Rogen and his “Frat Pack” contemporaries.  As a result, Green Hornet really ends up a comedy film with masked vigilantes, rather than the other way around.

The action sequences are pretty glorious.  Most of it involves the heroes’ favorite transport, the imaginatively armed Black Beauty, which should receive its own credit for all the screen time it gets.  The impeccable Kato serves up nearly all the coolest bits—so much so, that by the end of the movie, you’re left wondering what the point of even including Britt Reid was all about.  He literally ends up doing nothing in the movie.  Even at the final showdown between the wannabe heroes and villains, Reid screws up the biggest task he takes on.  Sure, the villains get their comeuppance in the end, but justice doesn’t really get served.  I suppose that’s material for the sequel to tackle.

The comedy is loud and broad, peppered with a serviceable amount of naughty words, so any parent who thought this would be a fun, Inspector Gadget-type movie to take their kids to will be pleasantly surprised.  Most of the humor comes from Reid’s moronic behavior and decisions, or relies on sight gags (the elastic top of Rogen wearing an adult diaper, for example), or parodies superhero tropes (James Franco and his glass furniture and Gucci-suited thugs was a bright point in the film), but none of it is especially clever.  This is a movie you’ll only find funny once.

Perhaps the biggest flaw with Green Hornet is it feels less like a sincere effort to pay tribute to the character, and more like a vehicle for some neat visuals and Rogen’s jokes.  There are no efforts to develop character (Reid remains unspeakably idiotic and unlikable right to the very end of the film), build relationships (Reid and Kato are meant to be friends, but there are zero scenes showing friendly moments between them—just Reid being a total jag to Kato), or even make sense of the film’s conflicts.  Exposition is sort of just patched over the plot holes to get to the next scene, and a lot of that exposition is through excessive dialogue or montages.

I knew Jay Chou when he sang bubblegum pop and called himself the Taiwanese Usher, so I had low expectations for his performance in the film.  And boy, did he meet them.  It’s not his English skills that are the problem, though at times he’s indecipherable; it’s the lifeless way he treats his lines.  Even when he cusses, you get the feeling he has no idea what he’s saying.  Rogen’s delivery, in contrast, is so psyched-up and over-the-top that he spends half the movie shouting, as if to make up for Chou’s lack of energy.  Christoph Waltz as the insecure crime lord, Benjamin Chudnofsky, ends up being the most nuanced character, but he’s still more a caricature than a believable threat.  Cameron Diaz comes across likable as always, but is given so little to do that she’s clearly just eye-candy.  The characters all seem like they’re striving to do something worthwhile, but the script just isn’t there.

Conclusion: Green Hornet is a terrible version of Rush Hour.  It has the same elements of idiot and foreigner buddying up (a “buddiots” film, as I like to call it) to stop crime in hilarious fashion and with lots of explosions, but it does it all with no sense of sentimentality or logic to keep it grounded.  An occasionally entertaining, but overwhelmingly pointless film.

Grade: C-

– Minhquan Nguyen