Like a bad bee sting, the Green Hornet becomes painful to watch and annoying as the superheroes take on criminals.
Although it’s clear from the beginning that the Green Hornet is not your average superhero movie, the main characters Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) and Kato (Jay Chou) didn’t seem like real superheroes and just didn’t convince me.
We are first introduced to Reid as a rich party child who still hasn’t earned the approval of his father, a media mogul and owner of the Daily Sentinel newspaper. After a bee sting kills his father, Reid decides to seek his revenge with the help of his housekeeper Kato and vandalizes a statue of his father. Just as the duo is about to make their escape, a group of hooligans attack a couple walking home. Reid is torn to help but ends up trying to take on the group of villains. Even though Kato does most of the fighting, it is weird to see Seth Rogen in this type of role, with past roles as a baby daddy in Knocked Up and a pot-smoking guy in Pineapple Express. With his distinctive voice and awkward ways, it’s hard to picture the Canadian actor as a true superhero.
As the movie continues, Rogen becomes even more unbelievable as he starts to develop the Green Hornet character, who wears a mask, does little fighting and hands out business cards to criminals. When the head of the gang world, Chudnofsky (Christopher Waltz) finds out about the Green Hornet, he also starts to doubt his abilities as a villain when one of his thugs tells him the Hornet is scarier than his boss who just wears a suit.
“A grown man wearing a mask is a little scarier than a guy in a suit.”
A transition of both Reid and Chudnofsky into characters that are more scary and believable never happens since they are both made fun of time and time again and are unable to do their work properly. The film is supposed to be a comedy and pokes fun at the superhero genre but it just doesn’t work.
My other issue with the film is the car. Not only can it shoot rockets, gas criminals and go through walls, but it is still drivable after half the car is chopped off. I get that superheroes have indestructible cars for a reason but when Batman blows up his car, he can’t drive it anymore.
Another disappointment with the Green Hornet is the constant use of slow motion in the film, so much so that it is exaggerated during the fight scenes to show Kato’s skills. It is just another example of why these superheroes aren’t believable because in most other movies, the heroes just do it and there is no question of it.
One of the only enjoyable aspects of the film is these superheroes don’t have any real costumes when fighting crimes, which says something about the caliber of the fighters but also says that these heroes don’t need fancy outfits to do the city justice.
Although I consider myself a superhero fan, the Green Hornet was a huge flop in my eyes and didn’t prove to me that Seth Rogen’s character and his housekeeper could handle the life of a superhero.