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Kato (Jay Chou) and Britt Reed (Seth Rogen) spring into action to combat villainy in “The Green Hornet.” |
On paper, “The Green Hornet” probably looked like an inspired concept.
Take the old Green Hornet premise — a smart and rich white newspaper publisher named Britt Reed goes masked vigilante with help from his Asian manservant Kato — and give it a contemporary, comic twist.
So, the publisher is now a bumbling, immature party animal (played by Seth Rogen, no less) who inherits his father’s empire and newspaper, the Sentinel, but doesn’t know what to do with it.
Kato, meanwhile, is no manservant. He’s a mechanical and engineering genius, martial arts warrior, piano-prodigy, weapons expert and coffee-making artiste.
Together, they decide to protect the citizens of L.A. by becoming good guys pretending to be bad guys who fight crime without badges.
Sounds irresistible, right?
Yet, director Michel Gondry finds all sorts of ways to make it extremely resistible.
His 3-D action movie never finds its proper comic tone, a balance between superhero camp and self-aware humor.
Worse, this film turns the popular radio/TV super vigilante into a noisy, thoughtless, lazy frat boy comedy with Rogen channeling a rom-com-grade Will Ferrell.
Taiwanese singer/actor Jay Chou’s charisma-challenged Kato doesn’t do any heavy lifting in the martial arts scenes. They’ve been shot with “Matrix” bullet-time effects, visually grabbing digital manipulations that could make the late Leslie Nielsen look like a kung fu master. (Read more…)