Review: The Green Hornet

With bizarro French director Michel Gondry at the helm and, in Seth Rogen, a leading man who doesn’t exactly scream ‘action hero’, I had high hopes for Green Hornet to be a more off-kilter version of the Hollywood action comedy. Disappointingly, Hornet very much plays it safe, taking the post-Iron Man angle of an equal ratio of explosions and laughs, adding a little more crudeness (no surprise as Rogen also co-wrote the film with his Superbad partner Evan Goldberg), but forfeiting the wit and cool factor that made the man in the red suit such a hit. The jokes are funny, but not fantastic, the action occasionally spectacular but mostly average, and the film fun for a single viewing but disposable on the whole.

After the death of his newspaper owner dad, lazy playboy Britt Reid (Rogen) decides to make something of his life by becoming a fake criminal/masked vigilante who calls himself the Green Hornet. Even though Rogen is the titular hero, we’re spared from having to buy him and his less than svelte physique as an ass kicking crime fighter because, as any good hero should, he’s got a trusty sidekick. As well a being good with a spanner and making one hell of a coffee, Kato (Jay Chou) can slow down time in his mind and kung fu the shit out of anyone.

Christoph Waltz as Chudnofsky

The martial arts in the fight scenes is impressive, but hardly better than that in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And Michael Cera is white. Forgive me if this is racist, but if there’s an Asian in a fight in an action movie, I expect that dude to be pulling off some serious Crouching Tiger shit, is all I’m sayin’. Even the freeze-framing/extreme slo mo, the only visually striking trick pulled out of Gondry’s hat, does nothing to get the pulse racing or the eyeballs popping. Because I saw it last year in Kick Ass. Most of the jokes succeed in getting a laugh, but they’re nothing but typical Rogen-isms, quips about boobs or sex or other juvenile double entendres that he’s good at because he’s done them in all his other films. Even Christoph Waltz, the actor who I was most excited to see as gang boss Chudnofsky, failed to be the scene stealer I had hoped. While his opening scene with the cameo-ing James Franco was one of the best of the movie and he had some other humourous moments, his character was not a memorable or unique villain. If you want to see Waltz in pitch-perfect form as a cold yet oddly charming European villain, you’d do better to watch his award winning performance in Inglourious Basterds.

And that’s the reoccurring problem with Green Hornet- everything it tries to do, someone has already done better. Throw in a complete miscasting of Cameron Diaz, hardly any use of the 3D format (I want my extra money back), and a draggy ending and things get even more disappointing. If you’ve got no expectations of it, perhaps Green Hornet would be a perfectly adequate fun popcorn flick. But my verdict: this is vanilla when it could have been something far more exotic.

5/10