Review: 'The Green Hornet'

What if millionaire Bruce Wayne, instead of pretending to be an airheaded playboy obsessed with girls, partying and little else, were in fact an honest-to-Pete airheaded playboy obsessed with girls, partying and little else? What if Tonto were the brains and the brawn behind his team-up with the Lone Ranger, and the Ranger himself was an idiot who got all the headlines? Is a hero still a hero if his motivations are little more than an excuse to get out of the house and play with cool toys?

These are the notions underpinning "The Green Hornet," a superhero romp brought to you by ... well, that's an interesting question. Two distinct styles compete for attention across the 148 minutes.

The movie was written by Seth Rogen and creative partner Evan Goldberg ("Knocked Up," "Superbad," "Pineapple Express"), known for improvised-sounding dialogue, plotlessness that hopes to be saved by slacker charm and Rogen's everyschlub persona (Rogen also stars). It was directed by surrealist Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), known for trippy visual creativity, often computer-aided. The blend is a bit like watching two architects on a blind date who have to build a Lego house over dinner.

Add in a Taiwanese pop star who sounds like he learned his lines phonetically, and there's a lot going on here, all of it at once and rarely harmoniously.

"The Green Hornet" started as a radio show, essentially a 1930s spin-off of "The Lone Ranger" (the Hornet was supposed to be the Ranger's great-nephew). Like the "Ranger," the property expanded into movie serials, comic books and a TV show. The TV show is best known as the American debut of Bruce Lee as the Hornet's valet, Kato. Although Lee played the character reasonably straight, his physical skill was obviously so far above everyone else's on screen that the show looked downright humorous.

The new "Green Hornet" makes this dynamic plain. Rogen stars as Britt Reid, whose borderline abusive father (Tom Wilkerson, a pro at borderline abusive) is the powerful publisher of the Daily Sentinel. Rogen responds by becoming a wastrel, party-boy jerk. When Dad dies, Britt has no idea what to do.

He bonds with his father's in-house mechanic, Kato (aforementioned pop star Jay Chou), who happens to be an engineering whiz with a knack for weaponizing automobiles.

Reid decides to go into the masked vigilante business and drags Kato along with him. He also becomes the most intrusive newspaper publisher ever, demanding coverage of the Green Hornet day and night. (Either he's also supposed to be the editor or the filmmakers have no idea what the difference between a publisher and an editor is.)

Cameron Diaz cashes a paycheck as the secretary/journalist love interest, and Christoph Waltz (the Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds") chews it up as the local crime boss.

At its (inadvertently) sharpest, "The Green Hornet" reminds one just how difficult, impractical and dangerous being a guy who fights crime for grins might be — Reid is a dilettantish dolt, and the movie celebrates his ineptitude. Without Kato's martial arts skill, borderline superhuman speed and tricked-out car, he would last about two minutes on the street.

This treads dangerously close to (OK, smashes clean into) the always problematic "magic minority" type: the nonwhite character who saves or aids or heals or cures the white character through wisdom or skill. (Usually, this character is African American.)

It was old in "The Shawshank Redemption," it was old in "Sex in the City," and in spite of — or possibly because of — efforts to make it obvious Kato is better than his boss at everything other than English, it still feels awkward and misplaced.

Maybe this is because Rogen's performance as a arrogant jerk is both a little too convincing and feels barely acted — their chemistry is nonexistent.

Mercifully, the action sequences are the liveliest part of the picture. Even when it feels like Gondry is directing this thing with one half of his brain tied behind his back, he still knows how to fill the frame with fun stuff to look at, be it neat twists on slowed-down bullet-time action or well-executed stunts.

And if you use your imagination during the martial arts sequences, you can pretend "Green Hornet" is a Chinese action movie, where doltishness and violence coexist with ease.

But the let's-fool-around-and-see-what-happens vibe of Rogen's script and persona never jells with the (even limited) narrative demands of an action movie. He might be trying to reboot the superhero movie around a more humorous core, and this is not a bad idea, but his style of yucks is not the way to do it. A blend of comedy and action demands precision from both. "Ghostbusters" this ain't.

"The Green Hornet"