PTG Movie Review: The Green Hornet

The Green Hornet
Starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz
Produced by Neal H. Moritz
Written by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg
Directed by Michel Gondry

Well, there’s ONE thing this new film incarnation of “The Green Hornet” has in common with its predecessor, the 1960s TV show starring Van Williams and Bruce Lee:

Kato was the most entertaining part of it. Maybe when they distribute the film in China they’ll retitle it “Kato”. It sure would be a savvy marketing move, since Jay Chou is huge over there for his musical talents.

What’s so baffling about this action buddy comedy goof-fest that writer, co-producer, and star Seth Rogen (along with his frequent writing partner Evan Goldberg) have thrown at us is that Rogen so passionately tried to fight down the perception growing among the masses that the film was going to be just a goof, another in his long line-up of stoner comedies. He showed up at Comic-Con last year with his cast and director in tow and presented the movie as something serious, something different than anything he’d done before, but it was a tough sell to the crowd. Hell, even the title, with the word “green” in it, works against Rogen’s hopes of presenting the film as anything but another stoner comedy, and himself as a believable man-child who grows into the role of a hero.

Going into the film, I wanted to see Rogen be successful, to surprise everyone with a film that was worthy of being compared to the films he mentioned in terms of trying to peg his movie’s tone to the public, Lethal Weapon and 48 HRS.. Also, as someone currently reading The Green Hornet comic book series from Dynamite Entertainment, a series whose first ten issues were written by Kevin Smith based on the movie script he wrote for a Green Hornet film back in 2006, I wanted to see a film that was AT LEAST as enjoyable as what Smith had wanted to put on screen would have been.

Walking out of the film, one of the my first thoughts was, “Yup. Smith’s film would have been better.”

This film gives us a a different spin on a premise that we’ve seen before MANY times, but works over and over again in the superhero genre: Britt Reid (Rogen), irresponsible party-boy son of millionaire newspaper publisher James Reid (Oscar-winner Tom Wilkinson, in a role he should have turned down), suddenly finds himself in charge when the elder Reid dies suddenly. Though uninterested in anything having to do with his late father’s once-great crusader newspaper (he’s got daddy issues), Britt does take an interest in one of Dad’s former employees, Kato (Jay Chou), who worked on Daddy’s many exotic cars and made a truly amazing cup of coffee. They discover they both felt the same way about Britt’s dad (Kato: “He was a little bit of a dick.” Britt: “Yes, yes he was.”), bond over beers and Kato’s engineering ingenuity, and after a drunken attempt at vandalism leads to some inadvertent heroism, Britt decides that the two of them could be a crimefighting duo. “We’ve both been completely wasting our potential,” Britt says to Kato, still drunk on beer AND being a hero for a night. “Well, maybe you a lot more than me.” Kato goes to work designing weapons, including “The Black Beauty”, quite possibly the coolest automobile seen in a superhero movie since the Batmobile in Tim Burton’s first Batman film, the two hit the streets of L.A. with nary a clue about how to go about their plan to pose as villains to truly scare the rest of the criminal underworld, and lots of violence, punctuated by goofs as Britt bumbles while Kato kicks ass, follows in their wake. Throw in Britt’s new journalism-savvy secretary Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz) and a crimelord named Chudnofsky who is neurotic about the possibility that he might not be scary enough (Christoph Waltz), and what do you get?

The equivalent of spilled split pea soup: a steaming hot green mess.

The biggest problem here, not surprisingly, is the character at the heart of the film. The best action comedies, the ones that go on to live in people’s memories as fun films that you can watch over and over again, films like Lethal Weapon, 48 Hrs, and the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies, had at their core intensely likable characters. Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley, Gibson and Glover’s Riggs and Murtaugh, these were characters who, though they could be outrageously funny, were never parodies or caricatures of people. They had enough depth to them that we could come to care about what happens to them on-screen. But Rogen’s Britt Reid is little more than a case of arrested development, an insensitive, narcissistic jerk who treats people badly even WHEN he’s trying to do something good, and he doesn’t ever REALLY change over the course of the film. To me, Britt’s antics weren’t particularly funny or likable; you want him to get his ass kicked so that maybe he will grow up, but it takes far too long to happen in the movie, and by then you just don’t care. Kato, in contrast, is written as competent and unbelievably skilled, but that character is never completely realized due to Chou’s limited acting skills (Many critics have pointed out his spoken English as the problem, but I disagree–it’s that his facial expression never changes. It’s not that he doesn’t speak well, but rather that he doesn’t emote well.) While he’s beating up on thugs, Chou does quite well–as I said at the start, Kato is still the most entertaining part of the whole thing–but when he’s trying to charm Lenore or arguing the Hornet and Kato’s next move with Britt (”Do you even have a plan?” “Yes, I have a plan! I just haven’t told you about it yet, and it’s AWESOME!”), it all falls flat.

It should be noted that the touch of director Michel Gondry, whose most memorable film work to date is the critically-acclaimed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is absolutely nowhere to be seen here. He’s even gone on the record and said, “It’s not really my movie,” apparently because Rogen had final say on just about everything, and thus it’s really Rogen’s vision of the film that we see unfold on-screen. In other words, Gondry’s talents, along with those of Wilkinson, Waltz, and Diaz, are all wasted here in what in the end became a Seth Rogen vanity project.

Fans of Rogen’s films will no doubt defend the work as irreverent, goofy fun, but I wonder if they’re really doing their hero a favor in doing so. After all, Rogen seemed to want to make a (slightly) more serious superhero movie, something that could be talked about along with the more straightforward superhero films that have come before and those coming later this year. Tossing it in with the rest of his library of stoner-noir classics instead may not, in fact, have been what he was hoping audiences would do.

Grade: C-