'The Green Hornet'

'The Green Hornet' (PG-13) (1 star)

Writers: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Director: Michel Gondry
Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz, Tom Wilkinson,
David Harbour, Edward James Olmos

I don't know if I would consider the new "Green Hornet" movie to be a true superhero movie. I don't think it really cares who the Green Hornet is and doesn't bother to give us a story that makes sense. I regard the Green Hornet as a poor man's Batman so I don't know why I was expecting anything good. "The Green Hornet" isn't even mediocre, this is one of the most obnoxious and incoherent movies I have seen. Congratulations to everyone involved here, you just set the bar extremely low already for 2011. I like Seth Rogen a lot but after "Knocked Up" he is pushing the movie goer's patience pretty fast. I think it might be a good ideal to make that "Knocked Up" sequel that is being talked about. Seth Rogen plays Britt Reid who becomes the Green Hornet. He is the rich son of a newspaper magnate played by Tom Wilkinson. Wilkinson yells in a few scenes and then he winds up dead and Britt has to take over the newspaper. He finds out that his cappuccino tastes terrible now and that is because his father's butler Kato has quit. Britt gets Kato back, finds his dad's gadget car and decides to fight crime. There is no good buildup to Britt becoming a crime fighter and he is annoying and a really big jerk. There is no character development and Britt and Kato become really boring very fast. They are battling a bad guy named Chudnovsky played by Christolph Waltz who tries but his bad guy is weak and poorly written.

The Green Hornet character is really dull and blandly conceived to begin with so the coolness of the character comes really from the car. Kato is also cooler but that is when he is played by Bruce Lee. Jay Chou can barely speak English and his acting is rough, he can kick ass pretty well though. The only interesting character is this car that has gun turrets on the hood and some neat gadgets that can rip through metal and tires. Not even Cameron Diaz, here playing a newspaper reporter, makes any impression. This is one of the most thankless roles I have seen an actress take on and all she does is scream and yell. That is all anyone does in this movie so that you have obnoxious people yelling and then some really messy and terribly directed action scenes. They involve fights that look like they were choreographed by Stevie Wonder and oh there are a plethora of explosions. It is not only that Seth Rogen is miscast but he is very unlikable here and when you can't cheer for the hero then you have nothing. There is also a fight between Britt and Kato that is needlessly overdone and mean spirited. I hated the Britt Reid/Hornet character and found the bad guy not even worth hissing at.

Seth Rogen has co written this movie and he should get all the blame. This becomes a super hero character that doesn't even rank up with that "Super friends" Indian guy or "The Green Arrow". The director Michel Gondry is a great talent who directed the wonderful "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" but he is the wrong choice for an action movie because his direction here is sloppy. He is also a very eccentric artist but sometimes eccentric artists can be pretentious bores and he can't direct action. This is also a PG-13 movie that is so close to (R) rated that I am surprised that it didn't get slapped with an (R) rating. There are impalings, stabbings and usually I am not bothered by this but when a movie is this terrible I notice that the violence is nasty and over the top. This movie is not fun, not entertaining and terribly acted or should I say shouted. Cameron Diaz is given the worst role of her career and Rogen to me embarrasses himself here. The car gets 1 star and everything else gets a big fat zero.