What could’ve been a wonderful partnership of Michel Gondry’s visual inventiveness & Seth Rogen’s comic ability turns out to be a slightly flat run of the mill buddy action film, making The Green Hornet (2011) more of a disappointment than the Kick Ass style, funny comic book production it should have been.
Seth Rogen plays Britt Reid, the heir to a newspaper empire who dons a mask & a mac to fight crime with his sidekick Kato after unwittingly foiling a mugging one night. Thanks to Reid’s position as editor-in-chief he’s able to put the Green Hornet (as he becomes known) on the front page everyday & create the image of himself as a villain so he’ll be able to act beneath the law to catch the criminals.
Christoph Waltz (last seen as the Nazi Rob Brydon in Inglorious Basterds) is underused as the villain Cludnofsky & Cameron Diaz’s character, Casey, might as well have the surname Exposition.
The plot twists & turns in some fairly predictable ways that wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the feeling that the film had been edited to death. Rogen’s usual flights of improvisation are cut short & Gondry’s unusual style of film-making is limited to 2 or 3 very short sequences. The 3D was tacked on after filming so there’s very little that leaps out of the screen at you & overall adds nothing to the experience.
While Jay Chou’s martial arts brilliance does lead to some impressive moves, they don’t come close to doing enough to reprieve the film. We’d be very surprised to see this getting a sequel, as we’ve seen from a lot of other superhero action movie adaptations. In fact, we’re fully expecting a reboot opportunity in the not so distant future.
The comic intent of the movie was a novel take on the superhero role, but ultimately doesn’t quite work as well as it could, much in the same way that Iron Man 3‘s Mandarin mutilation missed the mark or how Spider-Man 3 was ruined by the glib dance weirdness. Maybe superhero films and comedy just don’t go together all that well.
The Green Hornet (2011) film review – 2.5/5
Review by Simon Stone
