I don’t know exactly what I expected to get going into this movie, but I didn’t expect it to be good. I had already gotten burned by Cop Out and The Other Guys last year, two spoofs of buddy cop movies that didn’t live up to their potential. Did I need to see the whole thing all over again but with superhero masks instead of badges? I’ve liked the films that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote together before. Superbad was funny, and they teamed up with indie director David Gordon Green to make the solid Pineapple Express; but the trailer for this one didn’t look as much like a straight comedy as those previous films. It looked like another boring superhero origin story with a bit of a lighter tone. I need to sit through another superhero origin story like I need another hole in my head (the ones I have now are fine). For The Green Hornet they’ve teamed up with another indie director, but this time it’s one that I’ve never really responded well to in Michel Gondry. By the time I had seen the advertisements for this thing a couple of times I had already written it off. I didn’t even want to sit through another commercial for it, let alone see the entire movie. But, I did anyways. And I’m glad I did, because The Green Hornet didn’t turn out to be the film I was pigeon-holing it as at all.
It’s less of a spoof than movies like Cop Out and The Other Guys. That’s good, because other than Edgar Wright I haven’t seen anybody tackle a spoof or a parody with any sort of class or taste in quite a while. The Other Guys wasn’t horrible, but it was much more boring than it should have been. This film is more of a straight mix of the buddy comedy stuff that Rogen and Goldberg are known for and old school, mindless action from the 80s. The first act of the film builds kind of slowly, and I could see how some people might get bored if they came into the theater expecting a straight comic book romp and were just waiting for the action, but for me it was peppered with enough gags and funny asides to keep things entertaining. Rogen and his peers have become known for including lots of strong improvisation into their comedies, and though this was made by a director that isn’t a member of their little fraternity, that still seems to be the case here. It was often an offhand remark that seemed just thrown out there that gave me the biggest laughs. The dialogue catches you by surprise because it’s so much more casual and lacking in drama than what you get in most of these self-important superhero movies. I mean, I liked The Dark Knight as much as the next guy, but some of the monologuing that went on in there was borderline pompous.
And though the build relies pretty heavily on comedy to keep things intriguing, once super rich playboy Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) and his sidekick Kato (Jay Chou) become The Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato, plenty of action starts getting blended into the laughs, taking the film to the next level. The body count is huge. This is the kind of action movie that doesn’t care if random cops die in horrible car wrecks during chase scenes. It doesn’t take even a second to reflect on it. This nihilistic approach to action is something that has largely gone away in the last decade and it’s very refreshing to get it back. If you keep your tone consistently escapist, you can get away with stuff like this. I had problems with Kick-Ass last year because it had its characters taking part in horrific murders one minute, and then tried to dramatize them as real people the next. The result was an incongruity that was horrifying. The Green Hornet never bothers to treat anyone like a real human being or tries to dramatize anybody’s death, and it is resultingly able to wrack up a huge body count that results in audience glee rather than audience appall. And there are about a million huge car crashes in this. I can’t imagine how much money they spent on just smashing up cars: and for real. You get the satisfying crunch of metal on metal that only comes from actual stunt people smashing up actual cars, and not the detached, limp spectacle of computer-generated automobiles flying everywhere. I think at one point The Blues Brothers had the world record for most cars destroyed in a film. With all of the strong focus on comedy and the big chase scenes that went smashy, smashy here, it felt like I was watching some sort of modern relative of that classic.
Gondry’s other films have seemed pretentious and indulgent to me. They were too drowned in sensitivity, hand crafted dream worlds, and sentiment. I can understand that, for many people, this is a positive of his work; but it’s just not my cup of tea. I didn’t find Gael Garcia Bernal’s character in The Science of Sleep to be likable, and it kind of sank the film for me. I didn’t care for the quirky melodrama inherent in the relationship of the two main characters in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it kept me from being engaged in what that one did. Everything in those films is so precious and artsy. This film is different, this film is just fun. When Gondry’s talents for shooting things with innovative perspective and hand crafting visual effects are used just for creating fun action sequences, like they largely are here, turns out I really start to take a liking to the guy. The camera in this film always moves smoothly and confidently, creating kinetic scenes with unique points of interest out of mostly just dialogue. When there’s a fight scene or a chase sequence the effect is ramped up. Plus there are a couple of scenes that allowed Gondry to show off some of his trademark stuff. One in which a hit is put out on The Hornet’s head, and the image on screen splits from one perspective to about sixteen or so as word spreads around the city. As one person tells another the image splits, as they go on to spread the world the image splits again, until eventually we get a screen of moving tiles that split, and morph, and reconnect; and the whole effect was really impressive. The second was a hallucinatory dream sequence that simply represented Rogen’s dimwitted character trying to remember stuff. In Gondry’s other films this sequence would have been something earnest and dramatic that was heavily focused on. Here it’s used as a bit of a joke, and the effect is a lot more fun and a lot less pretension.
Seth Rogen overexposed himself a couple of years ago by being in about three films a month, and now there is a large contingent of people who are going to hate on everything he does. Add that hostility to the fact that a chubby dude has wrote himself the role of a superhero and this movie set itself up for a perfect storm of negative reaction. I’ve heard a lot of scoffing. I was guilty of it myself. But what we end up getting here is not an insecure comedian using his clout to paint himself as a leading man badass. Rogen’s Hornet is bumbling, stupid, and insecure. This is the same type of comedic role that he is used to, and is good at. Rogen is clever, the script is clever, and a large part of why this movie worked for me as a comedy is his presence.
I found Jay Chou’s Kato to be an absolute delight. His acting isn’t polished, and his English is far from polished, but it worked to give the character a unique, authentic feel. Kato is very pragmatic and unassuming. To have his character come off as slick and charming wouldn’t have felt quite right. He would have been too perfect, too unrelatable. Kato has a very specific skill set and a very mechanical approach to life that has made him very useful, but a bit socially awkward. When alone working in his shop, or when talking about some of the things he has come up with, the character radiates a calm confidence and comes only from overwhelming competence. But when he interacts with other characters, when he’s taken out of his little world of coffee, and machines, and kung fu, then we watch him begin to struggle a bit. That we’re watching Chou struggle a bit to get out the dialogue in English just adds to the authenticity of that aspect of his character. And it makes you root for him rather than resent him. The Britt Reid character is the exact opposite of Kato. He has cultivated no skill over his life whatsoever other than fast-talking and bluster. Watching the two play off of each other works very well in a nuts and bolts, buddy movie way. How will Riggs and Murtaugh ever learn to work together?!
The main antagonist that our heroic du run afoul with is a deranged, double barrel pistol wielding drug lord named Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz). Waltz may just be the most underutilized asset that this film has, as he brings a lot to the role, but he disappears for long stretches of screen time. As he plays in the script, Chudnofsky is little more than an excuse to give The Hornet and Kato something to fight against. But as he lives and breathes in Waltz’s performance, he is a character that I was interested in and wanted to spend more time with. With Chudnofsky Waltz is able to recapture some of the magic of his performance as the Jew hunter in Inglorious Basterds. He manages to make his psychopaths even more unnerving than most by playing them as self aware and sensitive. His villains are open with their emotions, vulnerable, and acutely aware of the sensitivities and vulnerabilities in their victims. Where most people play the cliché of the “cold-blooded killer”, Waltz makes his characters very warm-blooded, and the effect is much creepier. Chudnofsky doesn’t just know the pain he causes, he feels the pain he causes, and he wantonly murders without a second thought regardless.
