The Green Hornet
It's very tough to craft a film that's half-action, half-comedy that succeeds equally on both levels. The best template I can think of as an example would be Ghostbusters, one of my favorite films from my youth. The action sequences were terrific, and the danger, as silly as it was, felt real. It was also incredibly funny, which is to be expected when you have comedy legends like Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd leading the way.
Seth Rogen is also proven as a comedian, but his typical movie persona is quite different than Murray's oddball characters or Aykryod's nerdish intellectuals. Rogen has made his bones from playing everymen, general workaday slacker goofball slobs. These characters usually have likeable qualities, but also, more often than not, have just as many unlikeable ones. And therein lies the problem with casting him in a movie like The Green Hornet.
Rogen plays Britt Reid, the spoiled son of wealthy media mogul James Reid (Tom Wilkinson), against whom Britt has been rebelling since the death of his mother many years before. When James dies from a mysterious bee-sting, Britt inherits James's newspaper, The Daily Sentinel. And though he leaves the general operations to his father's long-time friend (Edward James Olmos), it is during a night of drinking with James's mechanic Kato (Jay Chou) - who also makes a terrific cup of coffee - that Britt hatches a plan... to become a masked crimefighter. After all, why not? He has the wealth to fund an array of high-tech weapons and vehicles, and with a martial-arts expert as his sidekick, what could go wrong?
Again, therein lies the problem. Britt reasons that his masked persona, The Green Hornet, is not a hero, but a hero pretending to be a bad guy so that he's not encumbered by the rules of morality the way heroes are. Which is probably just as well, because Rogen plays Britt as the same arrogant prick that he usually plays, but given his enormous wealth and overall cluelessness, it's nearly impossible to figure out just why we should root for the guy in the first place.
In Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. played Tony Stark as a rich, arrogant prick much like Britt; the difference was, Stark was a technological genius who, after a life-altering crisis, grew a conscience. He realized that his gifts were being used for evil purposes, and it changed him, and the change was well-realized and genuine. Britt undergoes no such transformation, you see... he's not avenging his father, he's just doing the whole masked-crimefighter thing because HE CAN. As a lark. Unfortunately, when you're a complete jerk and you surround yourself with really bad bad guys, that doesn't make you a hero by comparison.
And poor Kato; though he does 100% of the building and 99% of the ass-kicking, Britt acts like it's all about him, using his newly-inherited newspaper to publicize his exploits. Of course, it's easy to kick the asses of a bunch of lowlife thugs when you have a souped-up car, mondo weaponry and a high-kicking associated. But eventually, you're going to ruffle the feathers of someone higher up the food chain, in this case, an aging gangster named Chudnofsky (Christophe Waltz), who wants these pesky insects squashed.
I was so looking forward to seeing Waltz again, after the brilliant, Oscar-winning turn he made last year in Inglourious Basterds. If he could infuse this particular villain with even half as much charisma, maybe The Green Hornet would be a notch more entertaining. Sadly, Waltz is completely wasted; he spends most of the movie wondering what he needs to do to "come off scarier and cooler" to younger criminals who don't resepct him any more. Also completely wasted is Cameron Diaz as Lenore Case, a journalist who Britt hires as a secretary, not only because she's hot but because she's a crime buff, and he uses her knowledge to plan his secret strategies as the Hornet.
I will say that the action sequences are fairly entertaining; the problem is, they go on too long, to the point where it felt like director Michael Gondry was just filling up screen time. By the film's end, you've had more than enough, especially when the sequences descend into mediocre silliness. There were also a few moments where I laughed out loud, but probably not as many times as the filmmakers hoped I would, and not enough for me to consider this a successful comedy either. Rogen's prickish demeanor is more off-putting than funny, and an ill-advised subplot where both Britt and Kato jockey for Lenore's attention is juvenile and stupid.
Movies about heroes work best when we can be invested in the character, no matter how different from ourselves he may be. We can feel for wealthy geniuses like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, or everyday blokes like Peter Parker who are just trying to scratch out a living. Anyone can be a hero, but a hero that we don't really care about is just not worth the price of admission. Character development is essential in this genre, and this is where The Green Hornet went the most wrong. What a shame.
2 /5 stars
