The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011)

[dx23]

Roger Ebert gave it one star and blames Seth Rogen for the failure of this film.

[antnield]

Kim Newman for Sight & Sound.

[mfunk9786]

Roger Ebert gave it one star and blames Seth Rogen for the failure of this film.

Wow, I don't doubt that he disliked the film, but that review just reads like it was written by someone who was in a very, very bad mood when he wrote it.

[willoneill]

Maybe it was the movie that put him in the bad mood.

I'm still going to see it. I liked most of Gondry's work, except for The Science of Sleep, and there's no way this can be as bad as that.

[mfunk9786]

If this is even half as entertaining as The Science of Sleep, then it's time to start my Dynamic Top Ten of 2011

[tavernier]

Guess who likes it?

[swo17]

Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that someone would dislike Science of Sleep, as it's not the universal charmer that Eternal Sunshine was, but it's the Gondry film I most relate to personally.

[domino harvey]

Science of Sleep is the only Gondry I really like. The buzz on this one has been all over the map that it's hard to tell if it'll be worth seeing til some of you brave souls report back

[colinr0380]

The Green Hornet gets a brief mention in David Bordwell's piece on the health of Hong Kong Cinema, with this interesting aside on why Stephen Chow left the film:

...Yet all signs of life haven’t been muffled. In the current restrictive climate, Johnnie To can make eccentric, occasionally shocking films like Running on Karma (2003) and Throw Down (2004). I take comfort in learning just last weekend what terminated Stephen Chow’s directorship of The Green Hornet. According to one report he proposed to plant a microchip in the hero’s brain and have Kato control him with a joystick. In an Entertainment Weekly article not online, director Michel Gondry claims that Chow’s plans were too far out. “Really, really crazy ideas that you would not dare bring to a studio. AIDS was involved. Plastic boobs were involved too.” That Gondry, one of Hollywood’s approved Wild Things, can find something Chow proposed over the top gives you hope.

For the future of Hong Kong cinema more than The Green Hornet, I'm assuming!

[Finch]

Excellent negative review from Walter Chaw

Loved this bit:

the obvious front-runner for a few worst-of-2011 lists--a fate it'll probably avoid only because no one will remember the benighted thing an hour or two after screening it. Give The Green Hornet this, though: it's the first mainstream American film to even flirt with the idea of Yellow/White miscegenation since maybe the 18-year-old Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Rob Cohen's biopic about Chou's hero and the true antecedent to the Kato role. It's funny to me that men from one of the most populated places on the planet have, in the American cinema, been reduced to hilarious, impotent sidekicks or wise old men who know kung fu--or is there some kind of Little Richard image-castration going on here to protect delicate Caucasian egos from bedroom Yellow Peril? No, more likely the instinct that makes it funny to cast someone like Jackie Chan as Chris Tucker's bitch in the United States is the same one that fuels Chou's eventual rescue in this piece of shit by the titular lummox, played by Seth Rogen (make that rescues--the first coming when The Green Hornet tosses poor, dumb Kato a lobster-shaped inflatable to save his drowning ass). It's the same one that casts Mexicans as chulo drug-dealers hanging out on the East Side and poor Christoph Waltz, Oscar still warm, as an insecure crime lord given to monologues and bemoaning his mid-life crisis. The Green Hornet is bad stand-up, all improvisation and flop sweat you get to endure for over two full, agonizing, distended hours.

It's a disaster along the lines of Jeremiah Chechik's big-budget adaptation of TV's "The Avengers": misguided, misdirected, written with the grace of a concrete mixer, and full (but not full enough) of action set-pieces that make up for in complete incoherence what they lack in excitement. It has a moment at the end of genuinely ugly violence that feels totally out of place in a movie so cowardly and lumbering to that point, and throughout, it contradicts the rules and motivations it sets up for itself with the consistency of something that's making it up as it goes along. It casts a Girl Friday in the Lenore character and essentially reduces her to naughty workout gear and a good attitude as the rope in a limp sexual tug-of-war, and it opens a few father/son tensions it has neither the wit nor the intelligence to honour. This is the type of movie where you can tell when it thinks it's being exciting and funny, drawing us in on the discomfort when it turns out to be deadly stupid.

[Alan Smithee]

I absolutely credit Roger Ebert with getting me into film criticism and obscure movies. I found a dogeared movie yearbook from him in my middle school library and read it cover to cover like a novel. I don't agree with him all the time by any means but still love the guy. And I will say that I believe he is actually more guilty of letting his personal mood effect his reviews than most critics I know. Armond excluded.

[Markson]

$34 million opening weekend, which qualifies it as the third best January opening of all time (!), behind Cloverfield and Star Wars: The George Lucas Begins His Abusive Affair With CGI Edition. Which is, uh, something, I guess.

[Polybius]

Mr. Chaw's points are well taken, but I do feel compelled to mention that I always thought Chris Tucker was Jackie Chan's bitch.

[LavaLamp]

The Green Hornet film is, IMHO, one of those "it's so bad it's good" movies. If you (like me) went into the film not knowing anything much about the original show, you may have taken the film for what it was - a comedy. I found it to be a hilarious film, with numerous laugh-out loud moments. Some of my favorite scenes:

- After firing most of the mansion's staff, Britt Reid hired Kato back because he was the only one who knew how to make the elaborate espresso with the foam on top in the shape of a leaf

- The scene when Reid & Kato got into an argument, and Reid called Kato a "baby" and said that he had to go home to eat "baby food"

On a more serious note, The Black Beauty auto was amazing, and is by far one of the best tricked-out cars I've ever seen in a film.

The movie would have also worked very well as a drama, since the original TV show was a drama & this would have been truer to the source material (I've never seen the original show, but have heard about this over the years). And, it would have been interesting to have set the film in the mid-'60's (when the original show came out), which would have been more nostalgic. However, that would have required a completely different approach and would have been a much more expensive film than what was released.