The Green Hornet review

It’s fair to say that although the workaday trailers, ever shifting release date, 11th hour 3D conversion and eventual January dumping-ground opening slot dampened the ardour of many, the prospect of indie hipster Michel Gondry tackling a big-budget Hollywood adaptation of pulp hero The Green Hornet still held some tantalising possibilities.

Would the Gallic daydream believer imbue the hi-octane buddy-buddy larks with his skewed genius, or would the demands of a megabucks action-comedy stifle his invention? Could he successfully alter the DNA of the blockbuster enough to allow other free radicals to enter the system or would Tinseltown’s anodyne antibodies see him off?

It comes as some disappointment – albeit no great surprise – to say that despite a few fanciful flourishes, Gondry has fought the Hollywood law, and the law has won. Closer in tone to erstwhile art-house darling Andrei Konchalovsky’s crossover misfire Tango & Cash than the gleeful impressionistic chaos of Ang Lee’s Hulk or the opulent oddity of David Lynch’s Dune, Gondry serves up a slab of well-chewed fat that will have as much of a job in sating the cineplexers as it will attracting his usual coffee-house crowd.

Seth Rogen plays Britt Reid, an irrepressibly loutish LA trust-fund schlub who finds himself in charge of a news-media empire after the death of his father (Tom Wilkinson). Immediately bored with his new responsibilities, Reid hooks up with his father’s old mechanic Kato (Taiwanese poster, Jay Chou) – an engineering wunderkind, weapons expert and martial arts supremo who can freeze time but who has been content up to this time tinkering with Wilkinson’s classic car collection – and takes to the crime-ridden streets of Los Angeles in a gag-free, causally negligible, unnecessarily violent bid to free the city of sulky gang-boss Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz channelling Rob Brydon).

From here on, the film follows the path of every lacklustre buddy action-comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s not exciting, it’s not fresh and it’s very rarely funny.

One of the main problems is that Rogen-the-scriptwriter and co-scribe Evan Goldberg have tailored the script so precisely for Rogen-the-actor that instead of inventive gags, funny lines or comic situations, they have underplayed a majority of scenes in order to leave breathing room for his sidelong schtick and ironic mugging.

Too often he fails to deliver, leaving huge scads of the film feeling flat. Dispensing an awed ‘Fuck!!!’ every time Kato busts out a new piece of sick kit or something blows up, or being caught ogling Cameron Diaz’s rear-end isn’t quite enough to give the film the comedic slant it badly needs to balance out its over-familiar plotting.

The action is fairly explosive – if largely meaningless – and the 3D is as good as we’ve seen so far (even if the post-production enhancements give everything a strange, toytown tilt-shift effect) but these are merely welcome diversions from the growing feeling that you’re watching some straight-to-video eighties’ timeslip rather than witnessing a new dawn for blockbuster cinema.