Okay so I watched The Green Hornet last night. I waited until now to write this because my brain was completely shot last night after I watched it.
I knew within perhaps ten minutes that I didn't want to watch it. It was unpleasant on
so many levels.
First of all the script was pretty bad. It was bad from the standpoint of overall story. I knew this because I found myself not only not caring about the characters and how it was going to end for them but also because at some point I started to want to see the characters meet a particularly gruesome end. Especially Seth Rogen. I wanted to see him pushed off a cliff or something just so I didn't have to listen to his dialogue anymore. And that was the second part of the bad writing: the dialogue was ridiculous. I could give examples but then I would have a headache so I'm not going to. If you want a headache you can go
here and peruse the quotes at IMDB.
The casting was easily as bad as the writing. Who thinks that it is a good idea (in the movies) to have the male hero's love interest be ten years his senior? Rogen is 29 and Diaz is 39. Worse, she looks older than 39...a
lot older That's what hi-def will do for you, make you look older. The guy who played Kato is 32 and he looked younger, way younger, which made his play for Diaz look even sillier. So you are left with the thought as to why Cameron Diaz was even considered, let alone cast, for this part. You wonder if they thought she was still the same girl who was in There's Something About Mary or if no one else would take the part or maybe she lost a bet or something.
And, back to the script for a minute, who thought that it was a good idea for the "romantic interest" in the movie to hate the two male lead actors' guts? She hates the Brit Reid character from the word go and never warms to him...not even a little. She sort of likes Kato at first but then decides that he's a dick and hates him for the rest of the movie. Again, who thought this was a good idea?
And although I was cheering for the villain (see reason above), after a while I wanted him dead, too, so that maybe some other better villain might show up and get me interested in the film.
Having reflected on this movie for 24 hours (much the same way that one reflects on food poisoning (or maybe hives) the next day) I have these concluding thoughts:
- Someone thought that it was a good idea to put Seth Rogen in this movie, a part (hero) that he is clearly ill-suited for. Likewise, someone thought that it was a good idea to give him creative control of the film. Clearly, whoever made these decisions needs to be locked up with the guys who gave President Downgrade a Nobel prize. This is simply bad judgement gone horribly wrong.
- This movie, bad as it is, would probably have received a better reception if it had been made twenty or thirty years ago. You know...back when Michael Keaton was cast as Batman and Christopher Reeve was Superman. That was a time when heroes and super heroes had much lower (less serious) expectations. These days we are accustomed to having our heroes be absolutely deadly serious (or at least credible as crime fighters) and our villains of the pure unadulterated evil variety (Jack Nicholson as The Joker and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor are a bit of a joke, ya' know?). And by that standard The Green Hornet simply does not measure up.
So anyway, I stuck it out for all 119 minutes and was eternally grateful that it wasn't 120 minutes because it's entirely possible that I might have suffered a stroke if it had lasted even one minute longer. But I suffered so that you don't have to. You have read my review and now you have been quite thoroughly warned about this awful mess.
Final thought: I feel really clever and immensely superior to anyone who actually paid full price to see this in a theater so there's that at least.