The Green Hornet

Columbia Pictures

Rated PG-13

Running time: 119 minutes


















Click below to watch The Green Hornet trailer.



In Columbia Pictures The Green Hornet, playboy Seth Rogen's stern newspaper publisher father Tom Wilkinson, who writes about corruption in the city - is murdered. While trying to do something crazy to spite his stern late father, Rogan and his driver, Jay Chow, stop a mugging. Rogan then decides to become the crimefighter "The Green Hornet."

In a campy remake of the short-lived TV show from the 1960's The Green Hornet, starring martial artist Bruce Lee, The Green Hornet movie is the opposite of Batman in that playboy Seth Rogan as Britt Reid becomes a crimefighter while pretending to be a criminal - while Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne pretends to be a playboy in order to hide the fact that he has become a crimefighter that was wanted by the police for being a vigilante. While comedian Michael Keaton became too serious for playboy Bruce Wayne/Batman, comedian Seth Rogan is not serious enough as crimefighter Green Hornet/playboy Britt Reid. This is not surprising as the movie was co-written by Rogan. Although there are a couple of dramatic scenes for Rogan in which he was good at, there are very few of those scenes and the movie is really full of your typical Rogan comedic scenes. If we could combine the playboy Seth Rogan and the Michael Keaton's Dark Knight Batman, as well as treating the material seriously like The Dark Knight, we could have had the ideal dual identity/schizophrenic crimefighter.

Asian pop star Jay Chou as Bruce Lee's Kato is the brains of The Green Hornet duo - as Rogan's father's former mechanic, who not only designs and builds all of The Green Hornet's incredible gadgets - Kato also builds The Black Beauty, their car which kicks ass much better than The Batmobile. In fact, really The Black Beauty is why you want to see this action movie - with Jay Chou's martial arts the next reason. There is an homage to Bruce Lee with a sketch of him supposed to have been done by Kato, as well as homages to the old Batman TV show. It was great to hear the Green Hornet TV theme song at the end. The bad guy at first seemed to be a formidable foe, but he soon turned into a comic book character that even his henchman says that he is crazy. Rogan's secretary Cameron Diaz is the unsuspecting female brains of the duo as Chou and Rogan pick her journalistic brains to see what she thinks as to what the criminal "The Green Hornet" might do next.

Despite the fact that a paper newspaper seems old school, they have Edward James Olmos as the newspaper editor in the movie. Sadly - after an incredible performance in Battlestar Galactica - Olmos performance was practically non-existent in the movie as the newspaper editor, which is too bad as Olmos is in the perfect position to be Rogan's mentor. Rogan's desperation to upload incriminating evidence on the web seems very contradictory to the archaic newspaper technology in the newspaper plant that he finds himself fighting amongst. As friends of mine who work for newspapers will attest, the newspapers as a media for delivering news are moving more and more to being online and that there is less news paper being produced.

Rated PG-13 for violence. Running time: 119 minutes.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.