The Green Hornet

The Green Hornet (GH) is a movie that I'd been pretty excited about when the announcement of its production came over a year ago. My enthusiasm diminished significantly when the release date got pushed - twice - to this January. If the movie was any good, it would come out either in the summer or the post-Thanksgiving to End-of-the-Year time periods. So I went into this not expecting a whole lot.

And that proved to be for the best. How do I describe GH's plot? It's a lot like watching an episode of WWE Monday Night Raw or Friday Night Smackdown. There are three basic elements of the WWE plotline: 1. Spend the majority of your time following a story that is ridiculous, ludicrous, and otherwise silly in every respect (and if you stop and think about it long enough, illogical and nonsensical); 2. Have your main protagonists win your audience over through continuous sophomoric and juvenile one liners at the expense of the bad guys; 3. At the end, have everybody beat each other up (there's even a modified hardcore match between Britt Reid and Kato halfway through the movie). I've basically just described to you GH. There's nothing in this movie that will surprise you or shock you - it runs through the checklist of comic book movie cliches fairly smoothly. And the 3rd act of GH truly spirals into the depths of ridiculousness; at one point, I leaned over and asked a friend I was with about a continuity error and said, "Oh, who gives a crap?" That sums it up.

(Random Aside: There is an infrequent 4th element of WWE plotlines that GH does use to an extent: the hottie. Occasionally WWE storylines will involve one of their Divas as part of the story to ramp up the tension between the good and bad guy or use to garner audience sympathy for the good guy. This happened in basically every Macho Man Randy Savage storyline ever - thanks Ms. Elizabeth. While Cameron Diaz's Lenore Case doesn't necessarily ramp up the tension, she does garner audience sympathy for Seth Rogen's Britt Reid. Honestly, much like WWE Divas, the plot doesn't really need Lenore to be very noticeable or do very much, and again, much like WWE Divas, that's probably for the best, as in most scenes Diaz looks like she's calculating how much straight $$$ homey she plans on getting. Let's just move on.)

The actors seem to be going through the motion here. My folks saw GH and she hated Seth Rogen's performance. I think her stumbles on a line between funny and irritating; there are some moments of genuine hilarity and others where the jokes fall flat on the floor and he sounds like a baffoon. I wouldn't say he's not good, but considering he's the co-writer of the movie his comedic fingerprints are all over it, so if you're not a big fan of his, you won't like GH. I've already commented on Cameron Diaz, and I would say the exact same thing about Tom Wilkinson and Christoph Waltz, Oscar nominees who are better than this inferior material. The only standout is Jay Chou as Kato. He is legitimately charming and fun to watch.

Ultimately, you know what you're getting with GH. If you go in with the right mind set and appropriate expectations, you'll get what you're looking for. If not, you'll get stung.

I've really gotta stop ending these entries with bad puns . . .