Film Friday: The Green Hornet (2011)

The Green Hornet is a great example of what not to do when making a comic book movie. In fact, it’s a great example of what not to do when making any movie. It’s unpleasant. It’s stylistically confused. It suffers from horrid writing and confused direction. And it relies entirely on the comic talents of a man with no talent and less than no charisma.

** spoiler alert**

Bad Acting: Just about everything is wrong with The Green Hornet, but the biggest problem starts right at the top with Seth Rogen, who both stars as Britt Reid (The Green Hornet) and is a co-writer. Rogen is an awful actor. He has no charisma, no charm and no comedic timing. He roams this film acting either like a very unfunny, unclever, unlikeable Rodney Dangerfield or like he’s staring in Hot Tub Bachelor Party II: Maximum Jerk. Basically, he provides a machine-gun-like stream of whiny, selfish, angry, obnoxious and self-pitying dialog in every scene. No one else gets to finish a sentence before he interrupts and he never once says anything you will like or could possibly care about, much less respect. And he’s the hero.

There are other actors in the film as well, but not that you will notice.

Worse Writing: Rogen the writer is perhaps even worse than Rogen the actor. Despite Rogen’s intent to write Reid as a “loveable loser,” he is a worthless piece of sh~t. He fires people at a whim, he abuses his power, he is an idiot, he is an arrogant braggart, he all-but sexually assaults his secretary, and he treats his underlings and “friends” like they are garbage. Yet, as can only happen in a B-movie world, everyone continues to look up to him and wants to be his friend because that’s what the script calls for.

But don’t worry, all is forgiven because Seth offers us this cliché at the beginning: when Reid was a child, he stood up to a bully to help someone. Thus, we're supposed to accept that Reid is kind-hearted even though he never once acts like it.

The other characters are even more poorly drawn. Shortround, er, Kato is taken directly from Stephen Spielberg's Book of Acceptable Racism and constantly makes gadgets. . . like all Asians. He becomes Rogen’s houseboy. Edward James Olmos is in the film, that’s about all I can say for his character, as is Cameron Diaz. Rogen gave them nothing to do except smile as Rogen tears them to shreds with his red-rubber-ball sharp comedic wit.

As for the plot, well, Rogen couldn't think of much there either. It's pointless.

Confused Direction: Even worse than the pointless plot, however, this film is utterly confused about what it wants to be. It’s labeled an “action comedy,” but it starts as a very poor drama as we spend about an hour establishing Rogen’s dislike for his rotten father and seeing Rogen and Kato decide to become super heroes. This includes ten minutes of watching these two idiots test Kato’s gadgets in a 1980’s montage gone wrong.

About an hour into the film, we finally come to the first scene I don’t dislike. Hurray! This scene introduces Cameron Diaz and seems to promise that what had been an angry, tension- free, interest-free drama will now become a comedic farce. (The film should have started here.) But it’s a fake out. The rest of the film lurches from scene to scene drifting back and forth between being a second rate action film, an unfunny comedy, and a horribly dull drama about a character from Frat Boy Office Party the Revenge. The film then ends when they run out of bad guys, and we are told the father is now redeemed. Why exactly he is redeemed isn’t clear. Apparently, we are to excuse his years of lack of integrity as a newspaper owner because he was being threatened by the DA. The decades of bad fathering? Well, forget those, the film does.

As an interesting aside, the final few minutes, easily the best and most coherent part of the film, are stolen from an episode of the 1966 television series.

Horrible Villains: And that brings us to the villains. Did I give something away when I told you that the DA is the bad guy? Rogen might think so, but you’d have to be pretty slow not to see that one coming. Rogen gives us all the cliché signs, right down to the actor coming across as a jerk. It is basically impossible to see him as anything other than a villain. But he’s not THE bad guy in any event. He’s just a subplot tacked onto the movie to give the story something to do while Rogen craps on his friends.

The real bad guy is named Chudnofsky, and therein lies the joke. . . no one can pronounce his name! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Don’t you get it? Come on, that’s comic gold. No one can pronounce his name and that makes him insecure. You’re not laughing? Apparently, you outgrew that one on the school yard? Rogen didn’t.

Eventually, the Chudster gets so insecure that he changes his name to Bloodnofsky and comes up with some really long-winded thing to say before he kills people, I’d tell you what it is, but I honestly wasn’t listening. Indeed, the character and the actor (Christoph Waltz) are a waste. And for the record, like all modern cliché villains, the Chudster lets us know he’s evil by prancing around and killing henchmen because Rogen doesn't know any other way to let you know that he's evil.

Bad Everything Else: Everything else about this film stinks too. The action sequence are uninteresting and disconnected from the plot. They also reinforce how unfunny Rogen is, as he spends his time whining until Kato whips all the bad guys. Then Rogen goes around and maturely kicks them in the groin when they are down. Grow up Seth. The CGI is horribly misused too, like when we follow two beer bottle caps flying across the room, or how each fight scene freezes so Kato can scan whatever weapons the bad guys pulled as if he were the Terminator. This was misplaced and obnoxious.

Missed Opportunity: Finally, let me point out a true irony here. “The Green Hornet” came before “Batman,” but it feels like a “Batman” rip off. And in this day and age of the dark, vigilante heroes like Batman in The Dark Knight, the Green Hornet had an obvious path to take. The Green Hornet character, who pretends to be a bad guy while fighting crime, is tailor-made to repeat the Dark Knight formula. Alternatively, it could have been played as a farce or parody of the Dark Knight formula. Either would have made a memorable and entertaining film. But the one thing no one should have done is try to combine a dull son-hates-father drama with a bland action film and Hot Tub Office Party. What a waste.