The Green Hornet | Season of the Witch | Another Year

What happened here? The Green Hornet takes popular and enduring source material (the beloved 30s/40s radio serial and 60s TV show, which introduced Bruce Lee to US audiences), an artistically relevant director (Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame), a talented cast (including slimmed-down star Seth Rogen, and last year´s Supporting Actor Oscar winner, Christoph Waltz), and about $130 million dollars, throws it all into a blender, and churns out a heaping mess of a film that just about sinks to the level of A-Team or Transformers 2 incoherence.

The warning signs were there: a January release date (bumped from a competitive summer), post-production 3D conversion, loose adaptation of the material (this is, before anything else, a Green Hornet parody), and a divergent creative team that seems to be pulling the picture in different directions. That includes director Gondry and co-writer and star Rogen, who seem to have different ideas about where to take the material. Cinematographer John Scwartzmann (who shot Michael Bay´s earlier films), editor Michael Tronick (he edited Tony Scott´s earlier work), production designer Owen Paterson (The Matrix series), and an all-too-obvious heavy studio hand only complicate matters.

As is, this Britt Reid is one of the most unpleasant and unsympathetic action heroes to ever grace the screen. He´s Tony Stark minus the wit, intelligence, or inventiveness; all he has is money, arrogance, and an inflated sense of self-worth. The one big fault of the movie is that it never takes this thoroughly unlikable character to task for his faults; while it´s plausible as parody, we keep waiting for this smug idiot to get his ass handed to him, or to come to some kind of self-realization, and it just never happens. The character is presented as fault-ridden from the beginning, and he´s exactly the same by the very end.

Instead, the heart of the film belongs to sidekick Kato (Jay Chou), who builds all the indestructible cars and cool guns, and makes quick work of all the villains in combat scenes. He´s a far more interesting character, and while the film frequently seems to realize this, it relentlessly sticks to Rogen´s Reid. After the death of his father (Tom Wilkinson), Reid teams with Kato to fight crime, for some reason. The plan: they´ll pretend to be criminals, work their way up the ladder to drug lord Chudnofsky (Waltz), and, uh, report his crimes in The Daily Sentinel? Something like that.

There´s a few neat action scenes here (a hand-to-hand fight sequence between Rogen and Chou, competently shot by Gondry, is the highlight), long stretches of dialogue, a copy&paste plot, plenty of explosions and vehicular damage, and the battle of good versus evil, which has never felt as arbitrary as it does here. This is vapid, empty-headed entertainment where only the germ of good ideas remains, a major disappointment and a paycheck movie for all involved, except Rogen, who is working very hard to make himself so unlikable.

That includes Perlman, who has more screen time here than usual but nothing to show for it outside a series of lame one-liners, and Cage, who just sits around stone-faced, muttering in a low gravelly voice. I kept waiting for the traditional Nic Cage wigout scene, which never comes; he raises his voice above a whisper precisely once during the entire film. Few actors have his kind of film-to-film range, from batshit crazy (most recently in a brilliant Bad Lieutenant performance) to here, where he´s so impossibly boring you want to leap into the screen and shake some life into him.

The film only rarely comes to life, but for all the wrong reasons, during a rickety bridge sequence that blatantly cribs from Clouzot´s Wages of Fear (and Sorcerer, it´s underrated remake, and hell, all those other movies with rickety bridge sequences), or a laughable CGI wolf attack sequence (one by one the wolves become “wolfier,” as if they were shapeshifting from wolf into “wolf” – this must be seen to be believed), or the goofy-as-all-hell apocalyptic climax, which attempts to right all the wrongs of the rest of the movie.

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Leigh´s films are sometimes divisive (I had some issues with his previous, the appropriately-titled Happy Go-Lucky, and the treatment of its main character), and he poses a lot of questions without giving any easy answers. Tom and Gerri are good people, yet they seem to watch their friends (Mary, Ken) destroy themselves without attempting to interject. Leigh allows Tom and Gerri, and Joe and his eventual girlfriend Katie (Karina Fernandez), to be happy, while we watch the other characters struggle in life; have they achieved happiness? Have they been rewarded? Or are they just naturally content?

Most of the attention for the film has fallen to Manville, who gives a showy, tic-filled performance as the emotional Mary, with a face that can always be read like a book; she´s fine in the role (and a final, lingering shot gives the character extra weight), but the rest of the cast is at least equally good. Widescreen cinematography by Leigh´s usual cinematographer, Dick Pope, beautifully captures these characters, with frequent use of close-ups. Music by Gary Yershon perfectly suits the material.