The Green Hornet
If nothing else in “The Green Hornet” entertains you, there is a sequence about midway through that will do it. It’s an obligatory “friends fight” scene where all of the tensions that have built up to this point are released–in this case, in a flurry of fists and kicks between Britt Reid (the loser playboy who becomes The Green Hornet, and is played by Seth Rogen) and Kato (the mechanic/coffee maker/sidekick played by Jay Chou). It’s not any story tension that makes this scene work but the idiotic absurdity of how it plays out. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think that the scene would have been perfectly at home in “Pineapple Express,” the “stoner action movie” Rogen co-wrote with Evan Goldberg before they adapted this cult superhero for the screen. It also would have made sense in a movie like director Michel Gondry’s previous film, “Be Kind Rewind,” had that film been so inclined to include such a moment.
If that moment is a perfect microcosm of what could have been when putting Gondry together with a script by Rogen and Goldberg (who also wrote “Superbad”) for a superhero movie, the rest of the movie is a lesson in what was perhaps inevitable in such a collaboration: moments of lunatic inspiration (largely because of Gondry’s staging and visual finesse) between stretches of flawed execution. Of course, that practically sums up Gondry in a nutshell: save for the sad, sweet perfection of his 2004 film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the French director’s filmography (however entertaining) is a spotty blend of whimsy and weird comedy, whether it’s his 2002 debut “Human Nature,” his 2006 love story “The Science of Sleep,” or “Be Kind Rewind.” Make no mistake: I have a soft spot for all of those films no amount of Hollywood drivel could fill. But like Spike Jonze (another music video visionary who has been blessed with rich material for his feature films), no amount of technical perfection can mask an inherent imperfection with material that swings for the fences to show us something new.
With “The Green Hornet,” one feels as though Gondry was essentially a “director for hire” (and indeed, he stepped in when Rogen’s original choice, “Kung Fu Hustle’s” Stephen Chow, left the project). That lack of personal investment in the material is all-too-obvious much of the time, as we see Reid (the mess-up son of newspaper mogul James Reid, played by Tom Wilkinson) try to become a responsible adult when his father dies unexpectedly. That sense of duty from knuckle-headed tomfoolery is a perfect vehicle for Rogen, whose cluelessness-to-adulthood persona is an exact match for this material. Watching him in the middle of a story meeting at his father’s newspaper is a great example of what Rogen brings to this movie that few other actors could.
What I didn’t see coming is the way the movie portrays Kato (the role played by Bruce Lee on TV) in much of the same light. While I was expecting Kato to be a fountain of wisdom and a window into his father Britt never really saw, I was surprised when Kato is not dissimilar to Britt in his opinion on the elder Reid. Chou plays the role perfectly as written, especially when Lenore Case (the ill-conceived character played by Cameron Diaz) comes to work for Britt at the newspaper, and both Reid and Kato find themselves attracted to her. But can they set the tensions that arise from that triangle aside long enough to fight a purveying corruption and criminal underworld that is boiled down to the personage of Chudnofsky (played by “Inglourious Basterds’s” Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz in a gleefully-hammy turn of evil)?
In the end, Rogen and Gondry’s vision of “The Green Hornet” may not work as a whole, but there’s more than enough gonzo moments of action and comedy (aided by John Schwartzman’s terrific cinematography and James Newton Howard’s high-energy score) to keep you watching, regardless of whether or not you buy into the premise.
