The Green Hornet Reviews: "A Mess"

The Talented Jay Chou wants to kick Seth Rogan's ass for putting him in this mess.

Whenever a superhero movie comes out I spend the next three weeks answering the question of what I thought of it-- I know nobody means anything by it, but for the record I only go to about 5% of movies in the theater and almost none of them are based on comic book properties for the simple reason that they are usually pretty bad.

The Green Hornet has been in development for about twenty years.  When Tim Burton's BATMAN (1989) was a tremendous hit it was only natural to look to the characters inspiration-- Zorro and The Hornet to mine possible blockbusters.  Zorro made it to the screen in two films with Antonio Banderas, but The Green Hornet went through treatment after treatment including one that would have starred George Clooney and Jason Scott Lee (Who was excellent in DRAGON; THE BRUCE LEE STORY).

Sadly none of those efforts made it, instead Seth Rogan got involved.  Rogan has made a career out of playing doughy spoiled rich kids much the way Michael Cera has mastered the clueless lovable little boy man.   Hopefully we'll all tire of both of them and they can both sign deals to be on the next version of Survivor or Cake Boss with the chance that neither makes it out.

The thing that piqued my interest was the involvement of director Michel Gondry and the casting of Christoph Waltz (who was amazing in Inglorious Bastards) as the villain, ALMOST to the point of making me go and see this mess-- almost.

That's right-- I'm reviewing not the movie, but the reviews.  Because I know without seeing it that this thing is a complete mess:

"From the awful James Newton Howard action-sitcom score (congratulations, Michael Giacchino, you are now popular enough to be very poorly ripped off) to the awful assemblage of pop songs that collide into one another, to the baggy, unstructured mess of the narrative, “The Green Hornet” is a near-atrocity and a miserable experience. Rogen, Gondry, and company were promising the reinvention of the already-stale superhero genre but instead, with a self-satisfied smirk, they deliver another rotten superhero movie that’s just as formulaic and dumb as the rest. It stings alright, but not in the way you want it to."  -- Drew Taylor, THE PLAYLIST



"The Green Hornet" is an almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about. Although it follows the rough storyline of previous versions of the title, it neglects the construction of a plot engine to pull us through. There are pointless dialogue scenes going nowhere much too slowly, and then pointless action scenes going everywhere much too quickly.
Seth Rogen deserves much of the blame." -- Roger Ebert

I actually don't give a lot of weight to reviews, opting instead to see a movie for myself before I make a decision-- but when the reviews are THIS bad, I do take note.


Now let's see how many people are confused by the release of THE GREEN LANTERN in the summer, thinking it's just a re-release of this piece of waste.