Fridae

Before there was a Batman, there was the Green Hornet. Predating the Dark Knight by a few years, the Green Hornet was a millionaire who fought off villains with the help of a cool car, a cool sidekick, no superpowers, and a host of weapons. Seth Rogen’s The Green Hornet keeps this basic idea while drastically reworking the mythos to create an action comedy.

Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet is a superhero whose public persona – an immature, bumbling, ineffectual airhead and goofball millionaire – is not much different from his secret persona – an immature, bumbling, ineffectual airhead and goofball masked vigilante. It’s true that he’s a millionaire with a cool car, a cool sidekick and lots of weapons but the Green Hornet’s odds against the baddies are evened out because he’s so comically inept at everything!

The film chronicles the misadventures of the Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato, lifting heavily from and then cheerfully subverting the origin story narrative of serious superhero movies. There’s the benign paternal influence (played by a curmudgeonly Tom Wilkinson) who turns out to be a not ideal parent, the obligatory villain with a work ethic your Chinese Tiger mum would approve of (played by Christoph Waltz having hamtastic fun), and even tributes to Jacques Clouseau’s tussles with Cato in the Pink Panther films. As a superhero comedy, The Green Hornet seems to have escaped from an alternate universe where the Adam West Batman television series provided the template for the Superhero.

Collaborator Michel Gondry here provides his trademark surreal visual touches which fuel the film’s dreamlike and whimsical action sequences. However, Gondry, Chou, Diaz (in her return to superhero comedies 15 years after her outing with Jim Carrey in The Mask) and even Waltz face an increasingly uphill challenge which is Seth Rogen’s script. Like Jim Carrey, Rogen doesn’t have an off button and makes one too many bromance/fratboy jokes when the script could have done with more superhero/crimefighting parodies.

As a superhero comedy, The Green Hornet is genuinely silly and fun, but needed a more involved parody of superheroes and criminals, and possibly a song and dance sequence by Christoph Waltz.