The Green Hornet (2011)

[cinemabon]

The Green Hornet – Directed by Michel Gondry


Let me preface my remarks by using this opening comment, rather out of form for me: Green Hornet kicks ass! That said, French director Michel Gondry has taken the everyday superhero and brought him down to earth in the form of Seth Rogan’s Brit Reid, spoiled son of a millionaire newspaper owner. Rogan is about as superhero as your high school janitor. Yet, he manages to surprise you later when his performance does a 180, thanks also to his balance in the film, talented actor Jay Chou (who is destined for more work after this). The film immediately jumps into Brit’s character in scenes to establish the relationship he has with his father. This sequence runs by so quickly, you nearly miss the plot. Tom Wilkinson is James Reid, Brit’s unappreciative father who allows his son to wild. The boy never amounts to anything and takes his upper class status for granted. Enter Mister Cool, Jay Chou who plays the irreverent car mechanic and part-time coffee maker Kato. When Brit wonders why his coffee is so bad, the maid timidly replies, “You fired everyone after your father’s funeral.” No surprises here. The funeral takes place in the first five minutes.

From here on the film goes in several directions at once, directions I cannot reveal plotwise and not spoil it. Don’t read reviews that go deeply into the plot as it will take away some of the great laughs. Seth Rogan’s Brit could care less about the newspaper, his staff or anyone. He is all about Brit… and whatever Brit wants, he usually gets. When Kato introduces him to the incredible coffee maker that produces the “bitchin” cup of coffee, he offers, “Wanna see sumthin else?” He drags Brit off to a part of the garage the owner of the house had never seen.

The something else is an old 1960’s Chrysler Crown Imperial taken from the original television show. Gondry even offers up a brief but telling homage to fans of the old series when designer/sketch artist Kato just happens to have a few renderings of Bruce Lee in his artbook. The two men do not hit it off. In fact, they can hard stand to be around each other. Kato loves classical music. Brit loves rap. Kato has a suave manner. Brit is a bone head and too bold, in a brash un-polite way. The movie seems hopelessly lost in Brit’s rants and raves until it takes a few unexpected twists when Cameron Diaz enters as the aging secretary, a part I’m certain she felt a little too brutally honest. For years we’ve drooled over her skinny frame and cute face. In this film, we see the aging actress for who she is now… aging. Yet, she puts it all out there in total honesty that is very refreshing. The trio ultimately becomes involved in a way I don’t wish to reveal, because director Gondry has managed to keep the film fresh and not the same tired superhero shoot ‘em up. The violence is raw but the pace is fast and full of humor. I thoroughly enjoyed my time and recommend the 3-D version because of this caveat: at the end of the film, the ending credits make full use of the three dimension effect. They are a cartoon credit sequence that throws everything at you with deep perspective, almost as a joke. It’s hilarious and great way to finish. Shallow but highly recommended and loads of fun – fast cars, kick butt kung fu, and hilarious comedy. (PS, watch for two brief James Franco cameos that IMDB.com missed on the credit list)

[Johann]

Reviews I've read are harsh.
It looks underwhelming but I like that car.
I'll see it just for the car.

[Chris Knipp]

This and COUNTRY STRONG are the only significant Jan. releases available now in California (or maybe New York, but it has lots of other new movies I still haven't seen; here, not much) so I will no doubt see it. GREEN LANTERN looks possibly amusing but it comes later. Couldn't face COUNTRY STRONG today.

The NYTimes review today was very ho-hum; but it was by their main film critic, A.O. Scott. He says spoof superhero movies are over.

[Johann]

Superhero spoofs should be dead. I hate 'em, unless it's something like Kick Ass- a movie I haven't seen but have heard great things about.

I remember the Green Hornet show from the 60's was SERIOUS.
Britt Reid was like an even more square-jawed Dick Tracy, wasn't he?

I think casting Seth Rogan in that role was beyond a mistake. Yeah he's popular right now. Yeah he should be in big movies (I guess).
But the role of Britt Reid belongs to someone like Clive Owen or Daniel Craig- even if they wanted to go tongue-in-cheek.
You need a HERO for that role. Rogan is not capable of playing a superhero. Sorry. He's just not believable, and that's why I think they went for laughs on this one.
I could be wrong- I haven't seen the movie yet. Just going on what I've seen & heard here..

The guy playing Kato seems right, even though he can't touch Bruce Lee in terms of Icon status.
I am curious about this movie, but I think they could have made the Green Hornet into a classic. Why aim so low-brow?

[Chris Knipp]

Superhero spoofs should be dead. I hate 'em, unless it's something like *Kick Ass*- a movie I haven't seen but have heard great things about.

So you're saying superhero spoofs should not be made -- except when they should, when somebody makes a good one? I have seen KICK ASS; I think it was worth making, because of the girl. I have not seen GREEN HORNET yet. I can't say if Seth Rogen is a good choice or not. Of course he wrote the screenplay. And if his character is meant to be a doofus, he would not be wildly miscast, and Clive Owen or Daniel Craig would. Apart from the fact that they'd not want to do it, they would not be suitable for a doofus role in a spoof. I thought of Pierce Brosnan, who's willing to spoof his former coolness, but he's not quite superhero material. Don't think Clive Owen is either. As for Craig, he's the current James Bond. That's an image a spoof would tarnish.

[Johann]

Yep. Superhero spoofs should be dead. It's not an idea that has the ring of success attached to it.
If you're gonna do it, do it COOL. Do it AWESOME.
Don't leave any room for the word "craptastic" to be thrown at your movie!!

[cinemabon]

It took thirteen years to make this film. Oddly, Michel Gondry was the first director considered, dropped out and a decade later, came back to directd the project. The script is co-written by Seth Rogen. The take on the film is a generational thing. Since most of the current batch of critics are over 35, they do not understand the youth-oriented humor that is abundant. With a teenage son, I found the humor refreshing and amazingly subtle in places. I read some of the reviews. I think people were ready to dismiss the project before they saw it. While I respect Tony Scott, I feel he's been immersed in the New York Film Festival too much lately.

This is not vichyssoise. It's not even diet coke! Think of boxed candy, coke, and popcorn - not good for you but fun to eat. While the menu for the future of 2011 is full of similar pointless plots, I thought Seth Rogan's lackadaisical toss off as the spoiled rotten playboy hit spot on. I haven't liked some of his comedy roles. I thought he hit his stride with his portrayal.

As to the car... well, as I say, leave it to Kato... Jay Chou clearly has fun with this role. The Taiwanese singer-actor, well known and respected in his country, makes his screen debut with panache. I look forward to seeing him in other features... the next Jackie Chan.

[Chris Knipp]

Tony Scott spends about 1/90th at most of his annual movie-going time at the New York Film Festival. But he doesn't have the last word. The country-wide critic poll represented by the Metacritc rating of 38 show you will have to extend your indictment further. I have not seen it yet, and I hope i like it. If I do, I will be happy to defend it.

[cinemabon]

Nothing to defend, Chris. This is pure cotton candy and nothing more, a guilty pleasure, if you will. Tear it to pieces, "let loose the dogs of war." I don't mind. I know it's mindless trash... but it was fun and diverting. I'm back at my desk, chained to a saga... a million words to go... now that's mindless!

[Chris Knipp]

Peter Debruge's VARIETY review is very positive and adds context. Makes me really look forward to seeing it. Not sure why the Metacritic rating is a low, low 38, but I guess guilty pleasures don't do well with critics the first time through.

Here's part of Debruge's review:
Reaching even further back than the recent comicbook craze for inspiration, Michel Gondry's "The Green Hornet" feels less like a throwback to the hardboiled era in which the 1930s radio serial was hatched than an homage to buddy-based '80s action comedies. Though the film is a blast, marketing has been a challenge, with Sony fighting bad buzz, date changes and confusion with other better-known, emerald-hued heroes (Green Lantern and Green Arrow). Ironically, that perfect storm allows the team to defy the purists and reinvent the retro vigilante to their rowdy, irreverent specs, delivering the goods for a punchy 3D breakout.

[Chris Knipp]

Now I have seen this movie and I regret to say that I was very disappointed. Seth Rogen is overtaxed, his Asian costar can't act and can't deliver his lines in English clearly, and the action is chaotic, the dialog totally lacking in wit. $125 million was a big waste on this movie and Michel Gondry's distinctive style is nowhere to be seen. I don't know if I'll write a review because I'm working on one of BUDRUS and I want to see THE DILEMMA.

[Johann]

No need to write a review. Got it.

[Chris Knipp]

I might write a review because the subject is interesting, the history of the Green Hornet comic, radio, and TV series.

[Chris Knipp]

Michel Gondry: THE GREEN HORNET (2011)
Review by Chris Knipp

http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/7492/greenhornet.jpg
SETH ROGEN AND JAY CHOU IN GONDRY'S GREEN HORNET

Overgrown boys in love with their gadgets

Michel Gondry's Green Hornet, a long-delayed project now dominated by Judd Apatow regular Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script and stars, is an offshoot of an offshoot or an offshoot. The Green Hornet series developed out of Batman and Robin and Superman, with similar basic elements -- a wealthy superhero who battles evil at night and by day is involved with a big newspaper, and who works with a smaller sidekick with special talents. All these began in the heyday of the comics in the Thirties and Forties, but The Green Hornet was originally a radio show and later a film series. The incarnation strongest in living memory is the Sixties TV series created by George W. Trendle and starring Van Williams and a young Bruce Lee.

Gondry's movie takes the bold step of ironically undercutting the seriousness of the TV series with a rich, spoiled Jewish doofus (Rogen) replacing the handsome, dashing Williams as a comical version of Britt Reid, the hero. According to Armond Whilte, the changes serve to "demystify" the "sexual threat" of the TV characters who are "dashing" in their "harlequin maks" and neatly undercut the Sixties Reid, "who embodied the straight-arrow WASP handsomeness Hollywood idealized until the counterculture revolution of the '60s validated ethnic facial irregularities." Unfortuantely, this Green Hornet is not a very coherent or otherwise successful effort. It would have been nice if Gondry had done something like the French director Michel Hazanavicius, whose screen adaptions of the French James Bond knockoffs featuring one Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (better known as OSS 117) are deft, hilarious spoofs of Sixties macho style. Maybe the big problem is that unlike the French films, this one has a huge budget, estimated at between $125 and $150 million. That means a lot of explosions and car crashes and along the way a high body count -- not elements very germane to comedy.

The Green Hornet goofs around with the Sixties TV elements, with the same gadget-loaded car loaded with a flame-thrower and rocket launchers and mounted on a flip-around platform, the same decoy fake gateway, and so on, and a similar Asian sidekick -- this time Taiwan singing star Jay Chou -- but unlike Hazanvincius's films, is neither witty nor consistent. As the arch villain, Chudnofsky, Christoph Waltz, who was one of the jewels in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, is understated when outsize menace was called for. As Kato, Reid's driver, coffee-maker, and "man" (with the homoerotic hints of such a relationship constantly and pointlessly denied), Jay Chou suffers from two shortcomings that do not add up to comedy: he is not an actor and he cannot deliver English dialogue coherently. As the minor romantic interest and girl Friday, Cameron Diaz has the big smile and pluck for what becomes a somewhat slapstick role, but she is both underused and lacking in the glitz of the Sixties series' ladies.

Less of a schlub here, having dropped quite a few pounds, Seth Rogen still plays the amiable Jewish average guy he has always impersonated, but having to carry every scene is far too much for his one-note style, which here is pushed up to an almost hysterical pitch of naive delight in the fun he thinks he's having. These are two overgorwn boys in love with their expensive and lethal gadgets, and the crimie solving of the TV Hornet and Manichean wars of Superman are forgotten. This Britt Reid seems to have drunk a heck of a lot of Kato's espresso. Reid's comic ineptness can't be developed fully because in the Hornet's and Kato's encounters with villains, which the big budget and current tastes make much more violent than in the TV series, Rogen is successfully violent himself. The action sequences are boilerplate, and lack comic flavor. To do the movie credit, it has some memorable physical shticks, such as the long sequence in which Reid and his sidekick, battling Chudnofsky, who's changed his name to Bloodnofsky to have a supervillain brand himself, trash Reid's Daily Sentinel newspaper offices driving their hyped-up car, which is chopped in half but still runs because it's got "front-wheel drive." However Gondry's huge gift for DIY special effects, so richly displayed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and his other movies, gets plowed over in all the expensive mayhem. The 3D is literally shallow; it is so little used that you can watch a lot of the film without the dimming glasses and experience little distortion. The only interesting use of 3D is a split-screen of the gangsters scouring the city to wipe out men in green, where each panel has a different depth level, a very cool effect.

The sub-teen boy this movie seems ideally designed for will probably not miss witty dialogue, satrical use of the Sixties visual elements, or consistent development of the main character's new doofus status. The movie never makes real use of Reid's spoiled rich boy identity as it goes along: Rogen is a good-guy everyman; that's all he knows how to be. But even if it's excessively caffeinated, his enthusiasm is winning, and the movie's got plenty of good humor and plenty of action. This Kato's dialogue may be hard to follow, but that doesn't entirely matter since he's mainly a physical prop: as Reid/Rogen says, he's "a human Swiss Army knife," constantly producing intriguing new tricks and gadgetry (and a bit of Gondry's genius does come through here). As Andrew O'Hehir of Salon wrote, The Green Hornet is "Entirely watchable and often pretty fun, in a mishmashed, patchy kind of way." It's just not a delight to film snobs like me, and that's why it deserves its release in the January slump/dump US movie release season.

http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/6324/greenhornetsymbol.jpg
The Green Hornet symbol of the TV series
is prominently displayed at the movie's end.

_________________
©Chris Knipp 2011

[cinemabon]

I think its so cool how you add pictures and special banners to your reviews. Can anyone do this or is there a secret?

[Chris Knipp]

In the Forums section, anyone can, as far as I know.

[cinemabon]

You're the only one who does it. I still say its a secret. Wanna share or just keep the rest of us in the dark.

[Chris Knipp]

Get the link to the image you want to post. Put --- around it and it will appear. Or use the image icon, the fourth over, with a tree in it, above the reply box. A simple text link uses the first icon, the globe with the chain link at the base of it. If this confuses you, read a tutorial on How to upload and post an image online. You'll find one here. (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/400513/how_to_upload_and_post_an_image_online.html) I wish also people would post links to text content, which Filmleaf's current software makes very easy.

http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/7865/510221120111536311.jpg
Demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Jan. 29, 2011.

[cinemabon]

Thanks, Chris

[Chris Knipp]

You're welcome.