Kevin Smith must be spinning in his grave
THE GREEN HORNET
Directed by Michel Gondry
Screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, and Christoph Waltz
Reviewed by Matt Brown
January 12 2010
Screened in Real-D 3-D.
Indulge me next time, superhero movies of the world: kick off your franchise without the origin story. Consider it an experiment. Do we really need to know which version of "my daddy was bad to me" inflected your titular hero with the je ne sais quoi that makes a man put on a Riddler mask and become a creature of the night? Yes, Batman Begins was great, but we get it. If you can shorthand your sequence of parental angst to the degree that it's done in The Green Hornet - Tom Wilkinson pretty much barks "you're no good and you'll never amount to anything" at his kid and then kicks the bucket - then I think we're safe to get some in media res going.
Admittedly, in The Green Hornet (or this version of The Green Hornet; I confess to no familiarity whatsoever with any of the others beyond the name and the song), the origin story is sort of the whole shebang. Daddy dead, millionaire playboy Britt Reid (played by about half of Seth Rogen, in a perpetual state of hyperactive amazement) teams up with omnicapable cappucino maker Kato (Jay Chou), and they decide to become a superheroes. They do this by having about exactly as much fun as two young guys would have in making themselves an industructible car, cool secret identities (as villains, no less), and tricked-out weapons. The movie is about their fun. There's not a lot of noblesse oblige to any of the characters' motivations here: the reasoning behind the creation of the Green Hornet is youthful and self-centered, like - "hey, why the fuck not?"
The guys behind The Green Hornet - largely screenwriter and star Rogen, along with co-screenwriter Evan Goldberg and director Michel Gondry - seem like they're having a good time doing all this, and I don't blame them. It also feels like they're onto something, but sadly, the movie doesn't get there with them. The Green Hornet is funny for the most part and occasionally even clever, but it's at odds with itself. It has a few inspired moments of taking the piss out of the genre - our heroes' solution to a bullet wound is a screamer - but those gems run clickity-clack down the straight rails of the genre requirements, shackled in by the endless Hollywoodisms that litter the script.
The script is boring and unimaginative when dourly serving the plot points required by such a film - villain, scheme, manufactured inter-hero conflict. The looser, more riffy elements - Chou and Rogen's innate chemistry and charm, and Gondry's inescapable Gondryisms - come out occasionally and often elevate things, but serving two masters ultimately satisfies neither. There's a sequence later in the picture where principal bad guy Christoph Waltz (who promptly needs to seek a better agent) puts the word out on the Green Hornet, and Gondry fractures the screen into ever-unfolding subdivisions as the word goes viral across exponential underworld thugs; I liked this a lot. There's a nice, long scene of Rogen and Chou beating the shit out of each other with everything in the house; I liked this too (just like I did in The Pineapple Express). There are a few wild battles that feel legitimately like something we haven't seen before, and even wilder chemical reactions between our bromantic heroes that tackle the homoeroticism of male superpartners from new and weird directions. Scenes like these made me wish Gondry, Rogen, Chou and Goldberg had been let off the leash to make whatever whimsical, eccentric Green Hornet movie was churning in their heads when they came up with stuff like this.
But this is not that movie. This movie is in Three Dee, and is part of a comic book movie subgenre, and has Christoph freakin' Waltz straight off his Oscar, and is beating The Green Lantern into theatres by six months. That it is gormlessly entertaining is a function of its admittedly amiable charm, and that it earns a few belly-laughs is the natural result of Rogen's seemingly-endless ability to go get them. It's got cool cars and neat tricks, and is fun and pretty stupid, and doesn't feel like it ultimately gets anywhere or capitalizes on anything. It has a beautifully designed core of black and green, plopped into the middle of an utterly mundane Los Angeles that makes it feel like the filmmakers designed everything in their film's title and then forgot the rest of the film.
But now we have our Green Hornet movie. On to the next thing.