The Green Hornet

Movie: The Green Hornet (in DBOX)

Cast:    Seth Rogan                 (Britt Reid, aka The Green Hornet)

            Jay Chou                     (Kato)

            Cameron Diaz             (Lenore Case)

            Tom Wilkinson            (James Reid)

            Christopher Waltz       (Chudnofsky)

Genre: comedy, action, crime thriller

Synopsis: Gazillionare newspaper publisher James Reid is saddled with an irresponsible playboy son, Britt.  When James dies unexpectedly, Britt becomes the publisher of the newspaper.  He gets it in his head that he wants to be a crime fighter.  He teams up with his father’s coffee maker/mechanic, Kato to become The Green Hornet (and his sidekick Kato).  At the newspaper, he hires Lenore Case to be his secretary.  Much to his surprise, she turns out to be quite intelligent – not just beautiful. 

Their strategy to fight crime is to pretend to be bad guys while actually being good guys.  This way EVERYONE is out to get them, particularly the evil crime boss Chudnofsky.  The rest of the movie follows them as they try to fight crime while not getting bumped off by Chudnofsky and not getting arrested.

My two cents: I had high hopes for this movie.  They were dashed.  Kato was great, the Britt Reid character was just to irredeemably stupid and self-absorbed.  Even after he tries to turn over a new leaf and become a crime fighter, I could not get past his bumbling stupidity.  I initially did not blame this on Seth Rogan, but instead blamed it on bad writing.  But then I discovered that Seth Rogan was the screenwriter, so I guess it is his fault.

This had the ingredients to be a really fun movie.  Jay Chou was perfect as Kato. He came up with a really neat car and lots of James Bond quality gadgets. Cameron Diaz was great as the beautiful blonde who turns out to be the smartest person in the room. I loved Christopher Waltz’s crime boss character – funny and scary at the same time.  If they just would have written the Britt Reid character better . . .

Side note . .  I saw this at an UltraStar theatre and paid an extra $8 to sit in one of the DBOX special effects seats.  BIG waste of money.

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