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.
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. 
