The Green Hornet
Seth Rogen is Britt Reid, the rich and careless son of newspaper mogul James Reid (Tom Wilkinson). After his father’s death, Britt makes friends with his father’s personal barista and mechanic, Kato (Jay Chou), discovering him to be a multi-talented, highly resourceful inventor and martial artist. The two team up and ultimately become superheroes, posing as villians in order to make a reputation in the criminal underworld of L.A. with Britt adopting the moniker “The Green Hornet” in The Green Hornet. Based on the 1930s radio play (and the overall evolving franchise that ensued) The Green Hornet is directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) with a screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (the same writing team that brought us Superbad).
So it’s mid-January and already I find myself reviewing a strong candidate for the 2011 movie that has left me with the most mixed feelings. First of all it seems that, despite some reasonably straight forward marketing from this film, The Green Hornet has attracted different kinds of audiences with its array of elements. In other words this film has different aspects to it that imply contrastingly different things.
First of all, it’s a superhero action/adventure movie, not to mention one that has been passed around and has spent a sizable amount of time in development hell.
And secondively it stars current comedy star Seth Rogen, as well as being co-written by Rogen along with Evan Goldberg (as previously mentioned) displaying itself to be a typical American (in the good way, I like those guys) comedy. Although this may be unfair as I consider Seth Rogen to be a more versatile actor than most mainstream audiences believe him to be, however it is no less the case.
Third and final, this is a film directed by Michel Gondry who has achieved mainstream popularity but with a reputation as an “artist” rather than a producer of big budget Hollywood work, inviting people to freely infer that this film won’t be a typical rendition of the previous two hypothetical versions.
Now, it is not my belief that mixing these three different, uncommonly acquainted, shall we say “things” together spells a perfect recipe for disaster and it was my hope that they would (as I believe possible) compliment each other’s strong points, creating a solid and fun filled, mainstream movie, as the way I see it, a sophisticated, art-house-esque kind of film was complete not in the cards. Unfortunately the conclusion is that while this mix could have made for a winning combination, inevitably each part feels in or around halfway developed.
Similar to Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry’s direction feels like its half baked. The film looks and sounds very very nice but is badly missing much needed rhythm and character development, and every now and then we see a nice visual trick that is often (but not always) unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I love what Gondry does but I often feel like he’s uncompromising or unaware of what he can or can’t do, and often leaves scenes in his films to sort themselves out, which they don’t usually do. This isn’t helped by the fact that this film is just badly edited. The film doesn’t drag completely but rather dips in and out showing good ideas and decent pace, but then frequently dropping in quality.
The script is good and even includes a good story, but it feels like it’s done an incomplete job of marrying a good action/adventure film with a comedy and should have either made a decision either way on one or the other or worked harder on consistently mixing the two, but instead is uncomfortably boxxy. But I still liked the script, very much and felt like good direction could have saved it, as it was, but didn’t.
As a comedy/superhero duo, Seth Rogen and Jay Chou work very well and it annoyed me to see them almost trapped behind this film. Like I said earlier, I believe Rogen’s versatility to be underrated, although in this film his performance is a bit standard, but very likable. Jay Chou manages to be incredibly enjoyable and weirdly dead-pan, leaving me to ask what else is this guy in?
The truth is the entire cast is very good but most of the performances feel like cameos and often its confusing to determine the relevance of each character to the plot, as some of the performances are cameos. Even James Newton Howard feels like he’s just making a few brief appearances in the film rather than being a regular and he’s the music composer.
The Green Hornet in the end, was just a movie that I really wanted to like, and in parts really genuinely did. However it let itself down over and over again and really just felt like an underdeveloped version of a much better film. Although parts of it are just terrible, it wasn’t overall terrible and as a light mainstream superhero film it’s fine but it’s dissatisfying with a careless creative touch and unfortunately is a film that is reasonably entertaining but very frustrating.
Ultimately The Green Hornet is ok. Shame, really.
3 out of 5
