The Green Hornet, based on an ancient and much-adapted radio serial, with Seth Rogen in the title role and Michel Gondry behind the camera, is quite a bit less than the sum of its appealing parts.
Rogen, who wrote the screenplay with Evan Goldberg, his collaborator on Superbad, is slimmer than he was in Knocked Up but, if anything, more manic in his goofiness. He provides The Green Hornet with self-conscious, rapid-fire humor, playing the title character and his rich-boy slacker alter ego, Britt Reid, as yet another underachieving man-child just innocent enough in his playboy self-delusions to be likable.
Gondry, a visual artisan of unmatched ingenuity, brings some of his trademark handmade whimsy to this, his first foray into franchise filmmaking, conventional action and newfangled 3D. But the dull commercial imperatives of the genre overpower both his homespun surrealist wit and Rogen’s coarse, anarchic humor. The Green Hornet is not terrible, just pointless, and it offers further proof that superheroism is, at least for now, pretty well tapped out as a vein of lucrative pop-cultural bounty.
Photo courtesy of BVI
In retrospect it seems clear that we arrived at what ecologists might call Peak Superhero around the summer of 2008, when The Dark Knight inflamed not only passionate comics geeks but also skeptical cinephiles with its brooding mix of horror, vengeance and digital bravado. Even before that, though, big-screen chronicles of caped crime fighters were exhibiting the parodic self-consciousness that is a sure sign of decadence, even as movies like The Incredibles and Hancock were able to use the familiarity of the form as a platform for fresh ingenuity.
By now the winks of costumed avengers have become as tired as their glowers and righteous beat-downs. Last year we had Kick-Ass, Iron Man 2, Despicable Me and Megamind, each in its way trying for the kind of knowing, have-it-both-ways blend of allegory, action and gentle satire.
The Green Hornet adds nothing significantly new to the formula. What distinction it has can be found mostly in filigree and detail, as well as in the central relationship between hero and sidekick. Before his half-accidental transformation into the Green Hornet, Britt is the underappreciated son of a newspaper publisher (Tom Wilkinson), and the principal joke of the movie is that even when endowed with a mask, a pimped-out car and a catchy moniker, Britt still lacks both basic crime-fighting skills and elementary common sense. The brains, the combat training and the hair-trigger bravery all belong to Kato (Jay Chou, 周杰倫), who in an earlier era would have been called Britt’s manservant. The proper term nowadays would be bromantic interest.
Rogen and Chou have a loose, kinetic chemistry. Their verbal riffing is amusing in spite of Chou’s heavy accent and slow delivery, and they also demonstrate a lively physical rapport, aided by Gondry’s stop-and-start editing and his knack for hand-to-hand action. The best scene is a fistfight that caroms through Britt’s mansion, laying waste to a whole Sharper Image catalog’s worth of bachelor playthings. It is shot and staged with an old-school slapstick attention to detail and surprise, showing exactly the kind of care that is missing from the noisier, duller car chases and shootouts.
Still, even those, tedious though they are, show a few Gondryesque touches, like a flash drive in the shape of a piece of sushi and a chopped-up car plowing through cubicle partitions. The director’s use of the architecture and machinery of a newspaper headquarters — the kind where the presses and the offices occupy the same space; the kind very few of us work in anymore — demonstrates his affectionate interest in old technologies. That fondness, given fullest expression in Be Kind Rewind and brilliantly married with digital inventiveness in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and many music videos, struggles to find a foothold in a story with very little room for poetry.
Or for Cameron Diaz, who plays secondary sidekick as well as the mother figure and the object of just enough lust to allay any anxieties that Britt and Kato might not be straight. Diaz, a perpetual good sport, does her best, as does Christoph Waltz as the main villain and David Harbour as the district attorney who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a secondary villain.
The car and the mask, always the coolest things about the Green Hornet, are still pretty cool, but Rogen and Chou have more fun playing with the toys that Gondry has supplied them than you are likely to have watching the game.
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