Splice : Misdirected: Talented acting loses its buzz due to director’s confusing style
‘The Green Hornet’ review
Director: Michel Gondry
Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz
3/5 popcorns
In giving ‘The Green Hornet’ its first substantial big-screen treatment, director Michel Gondry and writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg certainly had their work cut out for them. Not only is ‘The Green Hornet’ essentially anonymous compared to the likes of ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Batman,’ the hero’s dynamic is also very unfamiliar. How would Rogen and Goldberg introduce an uncoordinated trust-fund baby who plays second fiddle to his much more capable sidekick?
Meanwhile,Gondry was tasked with an even greater challenge: making Rogen believable as a masked crime-fighter.
The principal creative minds behind ‘The Green Hornet’ are not uniformly successful in their execution of a relatively difficult production. They’re just clever enough to convince the audience of Rogen’s expectedly hilarious antics. The studio easily could have opted for a more traditional leading man, but with the wildly imaginative Gondry on board, what fun would that have been?
Content to party his life away in sunny Los Angeles, Britt Reid (Rogen) gets a wake-up call when his uncaring father, newspaper tycoon James Reid (Tom Wilkinson), dies from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Britt promptly fires everyone at the mansion, save for the maid and the exceptionally skilled mechanic Kato (Jay Chou), who happens to be an ace martial artist and inventor. Together, Britt and Kato conspire to pose as criminals so that they may infiltrate the Los Angeles underworld more easily and turn in the real criminals once they have them figured out.
Reid uses his father’s paper, The Daily Sentinel, to spread word of his actions as the mysterious Green Hornet to attract the attention of the city’s most prominent gangsters. Chief among the crooks is the Russian mobster Benjamin Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz), whose calculated ruthlessness might be too much for the novice heroes to overcome.
When Britt and Kato both become enamored with Britt’s new secretary, Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz), their jealousy of each other —not their inexperience — threatens to undo all they had worked for.
Rogen embraces his most challenging role to date by simply being himself: confident yet humble. Rogen knows he’s not going to be a dominant dramatic force in a superhero movie at this stage in his career, and thus he requests that the audience take him as he is or reject the film altogether. And he is simply outstanding. Newcomer Chou (a hugely successful pop star all over Asia) is similarly terrific as Kato, reprising a role that was inhabited by the legendary Bruce Lee in a short-lived television series by the same name.
Still trying fruitlessly to recapture the magic he conjured in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004), Gondry brings little of his magic to the table and actually bogs the action down. The climax is wholly unworthy of what came before. It becomes a mess of bullets, explosions and car chases that is hard to distinguish from a Michael Bay movie. The final half-hour is entirely generic and borderline ridiculous. Gondry also mishandles Waltz, an Academy Award winner, as he allows the actor to become a caricature of his iconic character in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ (2009).
Shaking up a famed franchise necessitates great risk, and Rogen handled his role in the production perfectly. The project thrives and dies with his performance, which was, in turn, born of his own script. Even if the film is occasionally absurd, Rogen ensures that it is always quite enjoyable.
Published on January 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm
