The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.14.11

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

So pushing the movie from the Summer Movie hot zone, during a decidedly dull Summer of movies, to the movie dead-zone of mid-January. Yeah, I guess they didn't see the forest for the trees on that one.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

A.

Funny, and it didn't suck plotwise.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

I enjoyed the flick a lot more than I expected to. I thought the humor would kill it but it actually worked very well. The villain was super fun and different and I kind of wish we had seen more of him.

The "Britt as an idiot" routine got a bit tiring after a while, but I'm glad they got away from it just in time to kick the film into high gear again.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

The Green Hornet

Rated: PG-13 (Comic book violence, drinking.)

My Grade: B+

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I've never read a Green Hornet comic, seen a Green Hornet cartoon, seen the TV series or heard the radio show. I went into this movie only knowing vague things about the character and with only minimal expectations. I went into this movie to be entertained.

The Green Hornet centers around a pig-headed son of a media giant and has never grown out of that "drunken, partying, frat-boy" phase of his life despite being in this 30s. When his father dies Britt inherits his father's empire and finds himself at a cross-roads of growth and chooses the path of "fuck it, I'll keep being a dick." Britt's relationship with his father was strained, to say the least, as was the relationship between the father and one of his houseboys/mechanics Kato.

In an evening of misadventures trying to desecrate a statue of his late father Britt and Kato inadvertently thwart a couple from a mob-mugging and decide to rid the city of Los Angeles of crime, the twist is they won't do it by fighting the crime directly but by posing as bigger criminals trying to beat-out their competition. This culminates in the local crime-boss getting threated by the loss of his throne.

Britt takes on the name "The Green Hornet", uses his newspaper to distort the local media into boost his rep and uses Kato's mechanical and martial arts knowledge to aid his bumbling antics during their adventures they also do most of their "missions" in a modified 3rd generation Imperial Crown automobile fitted with Batmobile and Bondian weapons and gadgets.

Overall, I think the movie works. The action is good, the interplay between the character is decent enough and overall it's a fun, pretty, movie to watch. But it's not without its problems.

The movie suffers from some odd directorial choices. There's a long action sequence during the final battle featuring The Black Beauty (The Green Hornet's car) and the bad guys cars in a chase on a freeway. During this chase part of me thought back to another freeway chase in a movie that one being in the movie T2. In Terminator 2 the freeway chase is steadily shot, slickly edited and is paced well enough to tell what is going from scene to scene. While the cars in T2 were only a couple (the car(s) the heroes were in and the ones the T-1000 was in) it's one of the better action scenes on a freeway I can think of.

In this movie the editing and shots are so quick and jumbled it's hard to tell what the hell is going on. Many cars are wrecked and blown up and it's hard to tell if they're the bad guys' cars or innocent motorists. It's a good action scene but for some reason I just thought back to T2's freeway chase and just how much better it was edited and laid out.

The other big problem in this movie is Seth Rogen. Seth is ordinarily a very funny man with a lot of energy in his delivery but here I think his performance suffers from him having so much "control" over this movie, being one of the producers. I think with that along with the director's inexperience with directing big movies like this one led to much of Rogen's delivery being a bit to energetic and just plain bizzare to the point breaking the "reality," calm and "normalness" coming from all of the other actors. In one scene he's trying to convince his office assistant to come back to work while at the same time he's trying to hit on her but his act is so out of line that it's a wonder that the assistant agrees to come back to work rather than calling the police and telling them about the crazed crack-head on her lawn.

A similar scene happens when TGH and Kato seek refuge in her home following a botched caper and she inexplicably lies to the police for them despite their entire visit consisted of Brett yelling rambling nonsense.

Seth is funny and can be a good actor but I think he suffers from a bit of the syndrome that another comedic actor, Will Ferrell, suffers from. The inability when to know the acting calls for you to dial your shtick up to 11 and when it calls for a more normal level. A movie like "Taladega Nights" calls for Will Ferrell to be a yelling, rambling jackass. But when a movie like "Wedding Crashers" comes along that's played pretty much as a straight, somewhat dirty, RomCom it's a bit out of place to have Ferrell -supposedly a man great at picking up women at funerals and weddings- to come along and practically dry-hump a mourning woman during a funeral and "buy" that he exists in the same universe as the other characters.

Rogen suffers from that here. He yells and over-does his own antics so much that it's out of place to the tone of everyone else in the movie. It's a problem some comedies have where the actors over-act and over punctuate their lines to the point of ridiculousness. Then you look at a man like Lesslie Neilsen in a "Airplane!" a movie where everyone is acting zany and nuts and he walks through the movie calm as can be as if he's really in a drama/thriller about a crisis on an airplane.

Seth Rogen has some funny moments but his character arc in this movie doesn't seem to flow very well as everything he says and does is cranked up to 11 it's impossible to see the "growth" in his character through the thing. And I really suspect that it had to do with him being an EP and the director not being bold enough to tell Seth when to dial it down.

Another minor problem is in the man who plays Kato whose broken English saturated in a Chinese accent is very hard to understand sometimes there's also moments when where his inexperience in movies shines through (and, again, the director's inexperience with directing new actors) as is the case in a scene when Kato is supposedly driving them between destinations, calmly, but his "fake steering" has him turning the wheel so much he'd be going down the road as if it was a slalom course built for a unicycle-riding jackrabbit on meth. The "driving correction" movement is common in movies, yes, but Kato's here is re-goddamndiculous. If there's that much play in the car's steering I question his mechanical ability.

All of that aside it's stll a fun, waste-of-time, movie and if Seth can tone it down a bit it'll be a fun franchise. As origin-story movies go this one also is pretty good to laying things out (even giving the two a smidgen of "super powers.")

I've no idea what the source material is like but part of me suspects it wasn't this high-paced, this filled with insanity and zaniness and that the hero was supposed to be this much of a Frat-boy jackass so I suspect fans of the franchise won't be enthused about this take on the character but people with no preconceptions should be pleased.

The theater I was in was pretty crowded and everyone seemed to like it, earlier showings were sold out so it seems like this movie is doing good business in spite of it being released in the graveyard period of movie releases.

I didn't see it in 3D, the movie was converted to 3D after-the-fact delaying its release from last Summer to now and since post-production 3D work on movies filmed in 2D that's done over the course of a few months isn't likely to look good. So I'd suspect more of the shadow box/colorform effect here more than either "depth 3D" or "nifty things jumping out at you 3D" effect so I wouldn't waste the extra money giving studios more of an excuse to keep shilling out this 3D shit.

Also, of interesting note was a movie trailer I saw where "Also in 2D" was a post-credit listing title card.


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Of note:

Edward Furlong (John Connor in T2) was the meth dealer.

The "Bruce Lee Cameo" can be seen as Briit flips through the sketchbook and sees the "self portraits" Kato has done of himself.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

Jay's first ever acting movie was Initial D which is all about Drifting - he probably picked up some bad fake driving actions from that.

The movie opens here on Thursday - don't know when I'll get to see it (the grandparents were supposed to be babysitting but turns out they'll be away this weekend). Of course as a big Jay Chou fan I'll probably be a little biased in my opinion of the movie.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

The Saturday estimates are up, The Green Hornet, and it seems another $12.8m for Rogan's superhero action comedy. The Friday number was underpredicted so the Sat one may go slightly up as well.

At any rate they movie pundits are ready to call The Green Hornet a 4-Day MLK winner with an approximate $40m, which if that bears out would make it the second highest MLK opener.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

Well, while I questioned them releasing this movie now (in the movie dead zone) rather than in a dry Summer it seems that it being the only movie worth watching in town "paid off." (I'd be interested to see a break down on how well the 3D version did over the 2D version.) IIRC this movie's budget as about $130m or so so it'd seem this movie is mostly a "hit" and may spawn a movie franchise of sorts.

Which is fine I really enjoyed it. Seth Rogen just needs to leave the speed at home and not sound like Jessie from Saved by the Bell in all of his scenes. I know that's more or less his thing but I enjoyed his performances in "40 Year Old Virgin" and "Superbad" where he was a bit more "tame" more. Here most of the time he was just rambling out nosense and acting like a loon.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

I was a little disappointed by the movie. It was good but it wasn't amazing. I guess there was too much hype about how good it was. There was certainly good humor and good action and all that. I didn't care for the "partners breaking up and fighting" bit though, I can't stand that.

Also, I don't know if something was wrong with the theater I saw it in, but the film quality was very grainy and looked pre-Digital, and this was in a digital theater. An after effect of a 2Died 3D movie? I've seen plenty of 3D movies in 2D before and they always looked sharp.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

The process was the other way around the movie was converted from 2D to 3D. If your movie looked grainy I'd suspect a fault on your thater's projectionist.

I didn't much like the fight between Kato and Britt either. I don' have a problem in with partners fighting in this manner as often times it helps to bring the two closer together but mostly because, again, Rogen's antics were a bit too broad to take the fight seriously.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

Saw this last night and really liked it, but it wasn't without flaws.

3D, why god why! And there wasn't even a 2D option at my local multiplex so I had to see it in slightly-out-of-focus'o'vision!

Rogan is fun to watch, but too often he seemed to be chanelling Will Ferrell! Also I think they made Britt too much of an idiot! By contrast they almost made Kato too cool.

Why was Cameron Diaz in this film? Seemed an odd choice although she wasn't bad.

Which brings us to Waltz, interesting that a man who could exude such menace in Inglorious seemed so lame here. and as someone who loves Gordry's work he seemed too contrained here!

And why oh why didn't they use the Green Hornet theme more? It's such a cool riff yet we hear it just once.

Like I say though, very enjoyable but not something I envisage watching again/owning. Probably give it a B-/C+ kinda rating.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

I thought that it was pretty good. Had a fun time at the theaters and a few laugh out loud moments including one of my new favorite lines:

"You have two things I love in woman: Balls."

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

I never found Seth Rogen's antics to be over the top or cranked up too high. He was pretty tame compared to what he did in Zack and Miri Make a Porno for example.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

^ I actually thought the opposite actually. Thought Seth was overbearing and bombastic as Reid and that ruined his portrayal for me. Jay Chou was refreshing and funny as Kato. Christophe Waltz was superb as the paranoid/self-conscience Russian mobster...Cameron Diaz felt underused and average. I liked the Black Beauty gadgets and a couple of the action sequences, the first Kato fight scene when he engages the thugs in the first half of the film was really well done. I liked how the film looked and their costumes. An average film at best. Superficial and nothing special.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

Yeah. Rogen's antics just didn't work for the "tone" of this movie. It was hard to take his character's arc seriously when he's being a rambling, yelling, idiot the whole time.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

^Exactly. He was really projecting in this film lol.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

This is one of those no news things I suppose as movies like this are always thought of as a franchise. But here is the standard movie talk of a sequel with a bit of how director Gondry was brought in.

I'd be curious to know if their current idea would involve a more matured Brit Reid. Not saying it'd have to go all serious, not that with Rogan as lead(and producer) it would, but I'd be curious to know.

They could even play a more serious Britt as part of the in joke. Similar to what Britt and Kato talked about were "mistakes the hero makes" and Kato mentions capes. Being more serious could be a running gag for a bit.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

Hopefully the sequel will feature the duo as being best buds and not turning on each other again.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

Cinema Snob's take on the movie. He didn't like it and doesn't recommend it and some of the flaws he points out are the same as some being said here (namely Rogen's performance) although it seems some people were able to look past most of that stuff and enjoy it on some level.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

Well I liked Rogen's performance because now I know what I am going to be for Halloween this year.

 

Re: The Green Hornet: Grade, Review, Discuss, Speculate-Seth Rogan 1.1

I think a mature Reid in the next film would be great for character growth...but knowing Goldberg and Rogen's previous works I think they'll still go more for the joke/buddy film aspect of GH which was revved up in the film. Even the serious moments were ruined I thought by Rogen's inane jokes. There were some humorous moments from him...I just think he was really bombastic. Especially in his pursuit of Elenore.