The Green Hornet
Michel Gondry
The story: Britt (Seth Rogen) is the party-hearty son of newspaper magnate James Reid (Tom Wilkinson). After his father dies, he and his father’s improbable mechanic Kato (Jay Chou) decide to battle crime in the city by pretending to be masked villains. The duo sneakily use Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz), Britt’s new secretary at the paper, to do the strategising as they try to capture the attention of chief baddie Benjamin Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz).
This is not a superhero movie. It is one about a petulant thrill-seeking schlub and his desperate ploys for attention. Subverting the cliches of the superhero genre is fine, except that it has just been done with greater aplomb in the recent film Kick-Ass (2010).
One had hoped for more from Michel Gondry, who used his trademark visual wizardry to such devastating emotional effect in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004).
But instead of bringing something new to the table, he seems to have succumbed to some genre conventions, giving us a very noisy and destructive romp through a newspaper office in the frantic finale.
Star and co-writer Seth Rogen has to shoulder some of the blame. The funnyman in comedies such as Zack And Miri Make A Porno (2008) and Knocked Up (2007) might have worn out his welcome among movie audiences. Here, he veers between being mildly annoying and massively irritating. Only at the end does his familiar likable goofiness come through.
The script is littered with groanworthy lines such as “I will blow this guy in any proportion I like”. For an audaciously funny send-up of the latent homoeroticism of superhero flicks, you are better off checking out the animated shorts of The Ambiguously Gay Duo from the sketch show Saturday Night Live.
Plot inconsistencies do not help Gondry. The picture of James Reid as a man of infallible integrity does not quite square with his palatial home and fleet of flashy sports cars. Also, the need to head to the newspaper office to download a critical file makes no sense at all given the existence of, well, e-mail and the Internet.
And then we have Asian superstar Jay Chou in the role played by Bruce Lee in The Green Hornet TV series from 1966 to 1967.
The pop idol cuts a dashing figure as a cooler, gongfu-fighting version of James Bond’s gadgetman Q. But whenever he speaks, it takes some work to figure out what he is saying: “Your father was a combraksh man.” Come again? Oh, he means complex.
At least the film does something a little interesting with the typically thankless role of sexless Asian sidekick.
Chou gets substantial screen time and Kato and Britt both vie for Lenore’s affections as equals. So what if Kato does not get the girl – neither does Britt. Guess this counts as progress.
(ST)