Review: The Green Hornet (2011)

Director: Michel Gondry
Cast: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christopher Waltz, Cameron Diaz
Rating: *

The shortest review of The Green Hornet would simply have to read: rather random. The comic superhero genre in Hollywood is becoming a bit like the ‘90s Bollywood formula film (with better costumes and no Govinda, of course). It sells, so everyone wants to make one. Alas, Michel Gondry (the man who directed the sublime Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the hilarious Be Kind Rewind), we discover, is no Christopher Nolan. And I’d be really surprised to see The Green Hornet get a sequel.

You’ve come to expect any movie with Seth Rogen to be funny. What you don’t expect it to be is tedious. The Green Hornet lines up all the set pieces of a classic superhero movie and tries to run them down with a bowling ball. You have a self-serious-superhero-meets-frat-boy in Britt Reid (Rogen); a role reversal between the bumbling front man and the punching-kicking-weapons-building Man Friday/side-kick (Jay Chou as Kato); even a mockery of the homoerotic bromance between the two (“He is my platonic friend,” says Reid). It works till a point. Before it degenerates into CGI sequences and randomly picked fights where a lot of glass is broken and entire labs and archaic press offices (Who has a printing press at the office anymore?) are trashed.

The source material is from a 1930s radio show that was adapted into a TV show that ran for a single season in the ’50s. The highlight of that show was Bruce Lee’s introduction to Western audiences as Kato. He became so popular that it was marketed as The Kato Show in Hong Kong. Gondry’s version gives Kato no such scope. Sure, he dominates every fight sequence, beats the hell out of Reid in a scene and rides a custom V-Rod Harley. But he is short-changed by Reid’s histrionics, long dialogues and general buffoonery. Cameron Diaz as the on-off secretary Lenore Case is nothing more than a cameo. The funniest act is by Christopher Waltz as the villain with a funny Russian name (of course), a bad sense of style and a worse sense of humour. He totes a double-barrel pistol and delivers corny lines with a straight face.

Some things in the film are cool, but are as insignificant as the leaf Kato manages to shape on the cappuccino foam, or the door-mounted gun on the classic superhero car.

Overall, it’s half-baked-slapstick-meets-masked-vigilante-exploits. And while the 3D doesn’t give you a headache, it doesn’t add value either. In the end, you’re left wishing you actually were Rogen in The Green Hornet (with his garage full of cool cars and gadgets). That way, you’d at least have had some fun.

- Sarit Ray

This review was originally written for gqindia.com (Click here to see...)