The Green Hornet: Nice Buzz, No Sting
You know going in that something’s up with The Green Hornet. A superhero movie starring schlubby Seth Rogen and directed by the French visual magician Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)? Like Watchmen, this isn’t so much a superhero movie as a critique of same — this time from a comic point of view.
In that sense, it’s the inverse of the old 1966 ABC TV series, which for the most part played it straight (and would help propel Bruce Lee to eventual superstardom along the way), in contradistinction to the network’s infamously campy pop art take on Batman.
Rogen, who co-wrote the script with his boyhood friend Evan Goldberg, with whom he also wrote Superbad and Pineapple Express, stars as a wealthy playboy like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark. But Rogen’s character, Britt Reid, is a spoiled, whiny slacker, so cosseted that the story really gets rolling when he discovers someone has bungled his cappuccino. By this point, he has lost his father, an L.A. newspaper magnate, to a fatal bee sting — but it’s the bad java that really stings Britt.
Demanding to know the details behind his morning pick-me-up, he encounters an obscure servant on his gigantic estate whom he’s never met — Kato (Taiwanese pop singer Jay Chou). Not only can Kato make a dazzling cup of joe, he’s also a martial-arts master, designer, engineer, mechanic, ladykiller and all-around genius. Picture an ass-kicking Leonardo da Vinci in black leather and motorcycle cap — who happens to work as a gofer. “We’ve both been completely wasting our potential,” Britt tells him. “You, a little more than me.” Soon, the two of them adopt disguises (Britt wears a green mask) for their first covert mission — sawing the head off a bronze statue of Britt’s father, who used to be mean to his son.
By accident, the two of them become masked crime fighters taking on L.A.’s organized crime boss Chudnofsky (a funny and merciless Christoph Waltz of Inglourious Basterds), and since Britt has inherited his father’s newspaper, he splashes the news about himself and his sidekick all over Page One. He even comes up with a nickname for the trench-coated crusader nobody but Kato knows is his alter ego: “The Green … Bee!” Kato suggests “Hornet” sounds cooler. Also, Kato doesn’t really like being called a sidekick, especially when his boss is an oaf. “I’m Indy, you’re Short Round, ” Britt insists. He tells Kato to back off Britt’s pretty new secretary (Cameron Diaz), who seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of crime for a temp and comes up with surprisingly perspicacious tips about what Chudnofsky might do next. But she, like everyone else, thinks Britt is a jerk. It doesn’t help that he says she’s in the “twilight” of her years.
I saw the ad for the movie on CBS. In 30 seconds, I saw the following faux pas re the Hornet I knew from childhood (going back to radio);
1. The Hornet sitting in the front seat of Black Beauty (thereby screwing half of Kato’s field of view).
2. The Hornet and Kato shuckin’ and jivin’ to hip-hop on the stereo, instead of listening to the police bands to determine what’s going on.
3. Kato squealing around a corner like a maniac instead of driving like the professional he’s supposed to be. And
4. The pair of them blowing up a traffic camera with Black Beauty’s weapons system- just because.
I concluded I was looking at a Saturday Night Live skit- “The Green Hornet and Kato as Cheech & Chong”- instead of an actual movie. (And for the record, I gave up watching SNL when Bill Murray left.)
With this synopsis of the movie’s actual “plot” (and I use the term loosely) to add to that, I have only two words for the people responsible for this “reimagining”;
Stop.
Eject.
And no, I do not want them to “try again”.
clear ether
eon
Every Seth Rogen movie that I’ve seen was like Cheech and Chong do Pulp Fiction.
Tell me again why Seth Rogan is funny. Like Dane Cook, I’m not seeing it.
I lament the loss of superheroes. They were supposed to be for children. Then along came a generation of arrested slackers who wouldn’t let go of them, dragged them into adulthood and wrecked them.
The whole “let’s make superheroes dark, cynical and cool” thing has chased me away. They can’t just do a film straight out of a comic book (and I mean a kids’ comic book; not a “gritty graphic novel”) because the filmmakers and actors are so annoyingly “cool” that they are embarrassed by the source material. They hate the costumes and the storylines, etc. So they have to change it.
Just about the only films I liked were Billy Zane’s “Phantom” and “The Rocketeer.” They were played with innocence and joy. You could actually take kids to those movies!
We’re in basically the same corner, here. Superheroes were created in the 1930s and 1940s by comic book writers and artists (notably Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, Jerome Siegel, and Joseph Shuster) to have an alternative to Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and the Katzenjammer Kids for children above kindergarten age. Later, William Gaines over at EC Comics decided to do “Horror” comics, aimed more at late teenagers, thereby arousing the wrath of psychologist Frederic Wertham against any non-Disney-style comics in general.
The effect of Wertham’s “crusade” was noticeable. The recent Batman movies are very much as Bob Kane originally conceived the character, and his world. The 1960s TV version was what DC did with Batman in the mid-Fifties to placate Wertham & Co.
The Green Hornet, on radio, TV, and in the comics, seemed to slip under the radar, probably because when Wertham was frothing at the mouth, it was strictly a radio show. The TV series (which lasted one season) spawned a short-lived comic book title (a collector’s item now), that like the TV show was suspenseful without being especially violent. Mainly because the Hornet has always been more of a detective than a “superhero” at heart. (Trivia note; in the very first broadcast of the radio show, it was established that Britt Reid, the Green Hornet, was the grandson of Dan Reid, the Lone Ranger. So masks were something of a family tradition with him.)
Those of us who thought Adam West’s Batman was a bit thick appreciated Van Williams’ lower-key, and distinctly more cerebral, Hornet. (By the way, Williams later retired from acting and became a real-life sheriff in northern California.)
Later on, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, NOW Comics did a Green Hornet title that went some 40+ issues. It explained that there were multiple generations of “Hornets” in the Reid family, all going back to Dan Reid, the Lone Ranger. It was less a “superhero” comic than “neo noir” in four colors on paper. I enjoyed it very much, precisely because it respected its origins. (Yes, I have every issue.) The NOW Comics version would have been a better choice for this movie version of the Hornet than trying to make it a “camp Batman” redo.
As for “Watchmen”, the whole point of the movie, like Alan Moore’s graphic novel, was that in the real world, you have to be out of your mind to put on a costume and fight crime in the streets. (Even if you look like Malin Akerman and wear skintight latex. Or especially so- yellow is not a good color if you don’t want to be spotted.) Also, that anyone with a genuine “superpower”, like Dr. Manhattan, would be viewed as a strategic weapon by governments, and be treated accordingly.
I liked the movie a bit more than I did the original graphic novel; the “villain’s” plot in the original story was too convoluted. In the movie, he had an epiphany of sorts; why bother “creating” a threat from scratch to unite the world, when there’s a perfectly good one around already? (Namely, Dr. Manhattan.)
Myself, I think recent films like “Watchmen” or the “Batman” movies are doing a fairly decent job of returning some of the darker “costumed avengers” to their roots. (“The Shadow”, starring Alec Baldwin, is another example, and much better than the critics gave it credit for.)
As for “The Green Hornet”, I’d say the film makers should have spent less time watching Adam West and listening to Seth Rogen, and more time watching Van Williams and listening to recordings of the old radio show. That way, they might have actually come up with something worth two hours of my life.
cheers
eon
EON:
Ditto!!!
The first time I saw the preview I figured I could wait for the TBS Premier, then turn it over to the History Channel to watch Pawn Stars reruns.
It’s like my granddaughter said after I took her to a Ducks Unlimited Banquet . . “well that’s two hours I’ll never get back”. They didn’t have any kids prizes.
Doubtless a silly movie. Nevertheless, my kids are going to be excited to see that there is an American movie starring Jay Chou. He is an unbelievably huge star here in China. We’ll have to start watching for it to show up in the pirated DVD shops (the only kind we have here, of course).
Ragnar, I 2nd that emotion.
Seth Rogan and his movies are more nonsensical, unfunny than any Adam Sandler crapfest.
Unfortunately, ‘Green Lantern’ looks like another stinker as well.
THOR though looks like a winner.
We went to see it last night. It was not as bad as the worst movie our family has ever seen [Mars Attacks], but we had the same urge to leave part way through and are not happy with wasting the money. For a movie to be a success, you have to have enough sympathy for the main character to be willing to suspend disbelief. The Hornet as played by Rogan was a useless, whiny, arrogant, waste of protoplasm who has a wide range of self-esteem problems all of which are richly deserved. The closest analog to him would be your average Democrat Congress-critter. For all the mayhem [and I will grant a slew of bad guys got wasted] they only helped two innocent civilians at the beginning, and killed off dozens in the violence in passing.
The only good point was that the theater is usually crowded with teenagers on a Saturday night. There were less than a dozen there with us. This dog is going to lose money.
Subotai Bahadur