Both Michel Gondry and Seth Rogan have certainly earned their right to make such a film, but never attempts anything beyond the ordinary action film. With Gondry’s past work, there is enough material to look at The Green Hornet through a critical eye. But nonetheless, it should also be noted that the film continues to have the similar spectacle and Hollywood supply model of exploiting serial and comic book characters of the past.
After James Reid’s (Tom Wilkinson) unexpected death his son Britt Reid (Seth Rogan) inherits his father’s large newspaper company. He befriends Kato (Jay Chou), his father’s mechanic and coffee maker extraordinaire who starts a relationship with Britt’s new assistant Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz) inciting jealousy with Britt. Reid and Kato slowly dive their way into becoming crime-fighting heroes backed by a battery of machinery thanks to Kato’s expertise.
Benjamin Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz) has nearly complete control of the city’s crime operations. Despite The Green Hornet’s bad guy doing good persona, Chudnofsky’s empire is slowly deteriorating, but so is the bond between Reid and Kato, and much more so, the quality of the The Daily Sentinel.
Gondry has little-by-little slipped into the public’s consciousness, first as an avant garde music video director, then bringer of Charlie Kaufman’s Brechtian turn of the Millennium dark comedies, and later, Gondry’s own multimedia and multicultural dips into magical realism. The Green Hornet would be the filmmaker’s first turn into big-budget Hollywood filmmaking and he might as well return to his collaborative auteur style when working with Seth Rogan (more on my theories of collaborative auteurism at a later date).
If anyone can create a whimsical experience, either through a short music video or an elaborate plot, it would be Gondry. For his first venture in adapting a previous source, is certainly misguided through nihilistic destruction, parody, and cliches that resolve to be just cliches. For one of the original masked crime-fighter franchises, The Green Hornet falls into the same cliches that it had once created, and the work of Gondry and Rogan appears to never allow it to escape from these tired tropes or from Rogan’s own voice. Rogan and co-scriptor Evan Goldberg have littered the dialogue with their sense of humor, were we supposed to be watching The Green Hornet or a Rogan/Goldberg blazing circle?
Regression and returning to childhood is a theme found in most Gondry films, both with and without Kaufman, and is certainly a theme in The Green Hornet. Is this Rogan’s penmanship or Gondry’s revival of his unconscious demeanor? Suspending the device of magical realism and replacing it with the wonderment of Kato’s machinery does not break Gondry’s momentum of magical realism, but alters it slightly, giving the film another character, although lacking human quality, as a tool for the progression of the characters and plot. We are never given a deeper look into how Kato’s mastery of machinery and other simpler things in life work or come to fruition, but that they just happen, even though we know he is dedicated to his craft.
For a mindless romp, The Green Hornet offers the rambunctiousness most current super hero films provide, but there is rarely any worthy punch to material. There are moments where Kato protests his assumed role as merely a servant and sidekick to Reid that has some implications of the typical hero-sidekick relationship. These struggles between the two heroes is as deep as the struggles get, and clearly shows that this film lacks an internal struggle within the main character Britt Reid. For Gondry, whose previous films make clever use of special effects through mise en scene uses computer generated effects to complete the trickery needed to make The Green Hornet come to life, a disappointment for one of the few filmmakers who have stunned us with visual wonderworlds such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep.
