HUH. This should’ve turned out better.
Admittedly, it’s not a fool-proof premise, but it is a promising one: Take a character from a long-forgotten ’30s radio serial and a near-forgotten ’60s TV series, hand him over to a brilliant director—Michel Gondry, he of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, The Science of Sleep, and about a billion phenomenally clever music videos—and a talented comedic actor like Seth Rogen, cast the bad guy from Inglourious Basterds as the bad guy, douse the thing in crazy slow-mo and trippy 3D, and… you know. Sit back. Let that shit happen.
But The Green Hornet takes all of those elements and does… well, very little with them. Overlong, muddled, and surprisingly boring, it suffers from a pretty crappy script (by Rogen and Even Goldberg), distracting and unnecessary post-production 3D, and weirdly limp direction from Gondry. Sure, there are some great sequences in The Green Hornet—fight scenes that manage to be both funny and cool, the occasional moment where Gondry decides to have some surreal, inventive fun with 3D—but they’re too few and far between. By the time The Green Hornet spirals into a loud, muddy climax, I was taking off my 3D glasses to rub my eyes, sneaking glances at my watch, and making a mental list of Michel Gondry music videos to YouTube once I got home in order to restore my faith in the universe.
The concept is more or less Batman: Spoiled, douchey playboy Britt Reid inherits his father’s fortune and newspaper, and also inherits Kato (Jay Chou), an extremely helpful, extremely charming sidekick who tricks out cars, knows kung fu, and makes awesome espresso. Somewhat inexplicably, they decide to fight crime; utterly inexplicably, they also both fall for the annoying Lenore Case (the annoying Cameron Diaz). And so it goes: They fight crime, they squabble, Kato invents some inventions, Gondry sneaks in a cool sequence now and again, and none of it is as much fun as it should be.
I did not see that coming…NOT!
I thought Gondry might be straight-shooting this one as a plain, glazed donut genre flick. It seems like he’s transitioning toward becoming a working studio director. I’ll give this a shot anyway. I’m not a big Fincher fan, and I truly despise Aronofsky, but they seem to be trotting in the same direction this year with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (ugggh) and The Wolverine (UGGGGGGH).
Bite your tongue, ‘Ovidius’. the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a great film! What’s a tragedy is that an “American” re-make is already in the works, ugggggh!
Damosa, I was talking about the remake (ugggh!)
I see, my bad. But yeah, i’ve decided months ago that i would no-longer waste my time/money on American re-makes of far better [Asian/Euro] films.
Seth Rogen, a “Talented comedic actor”, Huh? In what?
Isn’t there nowhere to go but up in regards to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”? Considering Fincher’s talent, and the fact he’s made it clear that he won’t be chained to the text, can only bode well for that remake of an overrated book/film.
And Stephen Chow should have made the film, but unfortunately, studio politics got in the way:
“…I take comfort in learning just last weekend what terminated Stephen Chow’s directorship of The Green Hornet. According to one report he proposed to plant a microchip in the hero’s brain and have Kato control him with a joystick. In an Entertainment Weekly article not online, director Michel Gondry claims that Chow’s plans were too far out. “Really, really crazy ideas that you would not dare bring to a studio. AIDS was involved. Plastic boobs were involved too.” That Gondry, one of Hollywood’s approved Wild Things, can find something Chow proposed over the top gives you hope.”
The Green Hornet as played by a comedic actor…didn’t they learn with Michael Keaton as Batman, directed by an arthouse director? They NEEDED Nicholson, and this film doesn’t have the name cred…Gondry DOES have a rep to live up to, that’s why he’s playing it safe…or boring…ah well, like the Shadow, if you cornball it up, you lose the dark potential. But hey, that’s Hollywood.
Hey now Stunto, Keaton wasn’t bad. Sure, he wasn’t even on the same planet as Nicholson’s Joker, but aside from Heath Ledger — and that one took everyone by surprise — I can’t think of anyone who could stand up to Jack chewing scenery like that.
That said, you have a point about needing a name. The kids these days barely knew what Watchmen was, and as a result, the movie adaptation of the most critically beloved, best-selling graphic novel of all time tanked. I can’t imagine how any Hollywood executive thought anyone (outside of Kevin “Smoked Himself Retarded” Smith) would give a fuck about the Green Hornet.