There was no way, I figured, no way on earth that a Michel Gondry movie about an inept crimefighter armed with a warehouse full of high-tech gadgets could fail to contain at least a few delightful moments—especially considering the movie is in 3-D—but the nation’s film critics turned out to be right. The Green Hornet is a big, lumbering gutterball of a movie in which it’s impossible even to spot traces of a more inventive and playful superhero comedy—maybe the version of this movie that Gondry and star Seth Rogen (who co-wrote the film with his Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg) might have originally had in their heads—peeking through the fabric. Much of the dialogue feels like filler designed to be replaced on the day of shooting by on-set ad libs and improvs which Rogen never found the time or the inspiration to create.One aspect of Gondry’s films that has largely gone unremarked upon is how unlikable his main characters tend to be—Tim Robbins’ prissy scientist and Patricia Arquette’s misanthropic activist in Human Nature, Gael Garcia Bernal’s sociopathic dreamer in The Science of Sleep, Jack Black’s overbearing amateur film director in Be Kind Rewind. Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the closest Gondry has come to a hero you can root for, and even he’s a guy who vindictively sets out to erase his ex-lover’s memory from his brain. Seth Rogen’s Britt Reid in The Green Hornet may not have a personality disorder on the level of Gondry’s other protagonists, but he is an oddly off-putting hero. He begins the film as a hard-partying, hedonistic, rich, spoiled douchebag, and when he takes up a new career as a masked vigilante following the death of his father, he’s the same irresponsible, unappreciative idiot he ever was, utterly refusing to treat his “sidekick” Kato (Jay Chou), a martial-arts expert and mechanical genius who designs all of his cars and weapons, as an equal. I suspect Gondry, Rogen, and Goldberg were aiming for something along the lines of Big Trouble in Little China, in which Kurt Russell played the idiot white protagonist who never realizes that his sidekick Dennis Dun is actually doing all the work of defeating the bad guys. But Rogen’s amateurish performance never finds the right note of lovable, swaggering obliviousness that Russell’s did; instead, his inconsiderate treatment of Chou, not to mention his loutish behaviour towards his new secretary (Cameron Diaz) seems completely intentional. Something monstrous has happened to Seth Rogen if he believes the character he’s created in this movie is actually charming.
Barely any thought appears to have been given to the film’s villain, a criminal named Chudnofsky who we’re told controls all the crime in Los Angeles but whose gang apparently consists of roughly three henchmen. He’s played by Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds, who struggles to find the right tone for the character, who has been conceived as both a ruthless killer but also a neurotic who considers changing his name and his clothes in order to make himself seem “scarier.” He’s absent from the action for long periods of time, finally resurfacing for a climactic battle in the offices of the newspaper that Rogen has inherited from his father. This sequence is grotesquely unfunny in the way Rogen blithely chooses to destroy his own building, at one point even arbitrarily driving his car through the newsroom, sending his own employees diving for safety.
If you want to see some love for the print medium in The Green Hornet, you’ll have to wait around for the closing credits, in which the names of the cast and crew pop out of the screen via 3-D versions of old-fashioned zap-biff-pow comic-book-style graphics. If not even Michel Gondry can recreate that exuberant spirit onscreen, the superhero genre may be even more exhausted than I thought.
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