In most romance or buddy films, when the two collaborative lead characters have their customary falling-out fight two-thirds of the way into the picture, it’s a relatively short scene in which some nasty invectives are hurled at one another and both proceed to their isolation chambers where they dwell on their separation in montages scored to sad adult-contemporary hits. In “The Green Hornet,” which does a lot of things in different – and more excessive – ways than the action-film norm, the conflict occurs at the appropriate juncture, but instead of an acid-tongued exchange building to an inevitable mea culpa, the two lead characters engage in a hilarious, inspiringly staged, prop-filled, knock-down, drag-out brawl in a massive estate. Expensive furniture and priceless gewgaws meet their makers as time and time again, in a seemingly endless loop of comic brutality, both characters suffer countless blows that would killed anyone in a heartbeat, only to walk away, sulking and bitter but physically unscathed.
Extraordinarily entertaining and perfectly representative of the smirk-filled, generation-Y action film, “The Green Hornet” is entirely self-aware. Director Michel Gondry, by way of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s screenplay, delights in setting up formulas and comically subverting them. When the title character quips to his victim, “You’ve just been stung,” the line is spoken with tongue lodged in cheek. Even the use of 3D, which one imagines may have been thrust on Gondry without his control (he wasn’t the first director assigned to this movie’s checkered production history) tends to mock its own superfluity: Half the movie, it seems, is composed of people talking in newsrooms, living rooms, garages and other interiors, none of which lend themselves to multidimensional spectacle.
Sticking to the original “Green Hornet” radio series – basic tenets, Rogen and Goldberg update the pulp classic to the present day, where Britt Reid (Rogen), the wayward son of a newspaper magnate (Tom Wilkinson), inherits his father’s esteemed publication after his dad’s surprising death. When Britt and his father’s servant Kato (Taiwanese entertainer Jay Chou) stumble on a crime in a public park and subsequently thwart it, the erstwhile slacker and the Chinese inventor decide to join forces. Donning the Green Hornet moniker, they moonlight as masked vigilantes while Britt promotes their exploits on the front pages of his newspaper.
Cameron Diaz costars as a go-getting newspaper secretary and Britt and Kato’s ostensible love interest, but here, too, the filmmakers defy convention by denying the audience its requisite romance. The Green Hornet eventually encounters a pair of cartoonish, deliberately over-the-top villains: a corrupt district attorney (David Harbour) and a soft-spoken druglord unable to sound frightening no matter desperately he tries (Christoph Waltz, playing opposite his menacing Nazi from “Inglourious Basterds”). The characters’ self-consciousness phoniness is endearing, but no conceit is as charmingly quaint as the idea that such a dying behemoth as a daily newspaper could wield as much power as it does in the universe of “The Green Hornet” (the film’s climax is even set in a printing press – remember those?).
Gondry and Rogen aren’t the first moviemakers to subvert superhero movies; in the end, “The Green Hornet” falls somewhere in between the loony genius of “Orgazmo”and the insipid juvenilia of “Kick-Ass.” But it sure is a lot of fun.
