Enter The Snarklefarg Of Gamar!

Does anybody actually know anything about the Green Hornet? Not the new movie. I mean the character. Some people probably remember the 1960's television show. Not because it was any good, of course. The only reason that show is remembered is because Bruce Lee played the Green Hornet's trusty sidekick, Kato.


Watching the series, one might just sit back and marvel at how worthless the Green Hornet actually is. Kato's the ass-kicker. He's the only one who actually seems to know what he's doing whenever our heroes get into a scrap with some baddies. Now it's tough to blame the actor who played the Green Hornet for this. He's not a fighter by nature. He's just some schlubby actor who was cursed with the misfortune of playing against Bruce fucking Lee.

But at least in previous iterations of the character, the Green Hornet himself brought his intellect to the table. He was Batman before Batman. A rich dude using his brains to take the fight to the criminal element in a way the police force couldn't, often portraying himself as a villain in order to ingratiate himself with the bad guys before he fucked their shit up. That was something I always liked about the Green Hornet as a character. He wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty to get the job done. He didn't care about public perception, dammit. He cared about results.

I'm sitting here still trying to remember the name of the actor who played the Green Hornet in the '60's series, and I'm drawing a blank. I realize that I could solve my problem with a quick check to IMDB, but I don't really care. Sorry, "guy who played the Green Hornet"!

Back on point (is there a point? to any of this?), the Green Hornet as a character always brought something else to the table aside from his fortune. He had that whole "keen intellect + cool gadgets = badass" thing going on. In Michel Gondry's big screen The Green Hornet, the titular vigilante is basically dead weight. I understood that this would be the likely scenario beforehand, considering the star/co-writer Seth Rogen doesn't really see himself as the heroic type. But... eh, let me run through this movie again before I confuse myself.

Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) is our hero. As a young lad, he stood up to a bully who was picking on one of his school chums. He got roughed up, and upon hearing about this, his asshole father verbally abuses his son then tears the head off his favorite superhero action figure before his eyes. Seriously, Britt's father is a cunt. Apparently, this moment so completely fucked up young Britt, that he grew up to be a carefree party boy. He loves to get drunk and trash hotel rooms with his entourage of hot chicks and frat boy-esque sycophants who are just along for the ride.

Britt Reid's father really fucked up his baby boy.

Instead of following in his old man's footsteps to run the family newspaper "empire" (tee hee!), Britt is content with wasting the rest of his life on frivolity and excess. A man after my own heart. Until, of course, tragedy strikes when Elder Reid is fatally stung by a bee. Now Britt, a man with very little in the way of intelligence, is handed a fucking newspaper to run in a recession. Sure, he's broken up about his dead daddy, I guess. But he really was an asshole, so our hero's mourning period is brief.

Oh Jesus. Do I really have to do this? I'm having some sort of existential crisis in the middle of my insanely-late review. If you think this lateness is bad, I've still got some Christmas decorations up. But that's another ball of wax. Right now, I'm struggling to type up a plot summary for The Green Hornet, but it's just so difficult. I don't need to tell you this, Dear Imaginary Reader, because you're struggling to read this abomination of a review. At least I can take solace in the fact that if you are reading this, then that must mean I finish this fucking thing at some point.

Moving on, Britt meets Kato (Jay Chou), who was the old man's... I don't know, personal assistant? Mechanic? The details are a little fuzzy. Suffice to say, Kato is a genius. Really, a grade-A motherfucking genius. He's invented the ultimate cappucino machine, as well as made some amazing modifications to his boss's collection of vintage automobiles. The kind of shit that your average newspaper owner has no business attaching to his cars. Batman-type shit.

At this point, I was wondering if perhaps Britt's father was the original Green Hornet, or at least the latest Green Hornet. Why else would he be employing a Chinese mad scientist to provide him with all of these cool car-related gadgets? Alas, the old man was just a paranoid geezer. Yawn.

Britt and Kato bond over a long night of drinking, telling stories about the old man's legendary assholery. Then Britt gets the bright idea to drive down to the graveyard in disguise and chop the head off a recently erected statue commemorating daddy's lifetime of achievement in print journalism. Things go well enough, until our dynamic duo spot a young couple out for a walk in the middle of the night being accosted by street punks.

Britt decides to involve himself, dragging a reluctant Kato into the fray because without his help, Britt would inevitably die bleeding on the street and this movie would end all too quickly. Kato kicks some delinquent ass, and our heroes evade the police in a high speed chase, giddy as school children on a weekend sugar high.

This night of revelations gives Britt the bright idea to become a vigilante, posing as a villain to draw out the city's criminal element. He uses his power at the newspaper to print eroneous stories about "the Green Hornet", cementing his reputation as villainous scum to the populace. Meanwhile, he and Kato are cruising the streets each night, busting up drug rings and making things difficult for local crime lord Chudnofsky, a soft-spoken European man in the midst of a mid-life crisis.

Enter Cameron Diaz as Britt's new secretary, Lenore. She's overqualified for her job, and both Britt and Kato want to boink her. Mostly, Britt just picks her brain to formulate new strategies for the Green Hornet to strike at the heart of the city's criminal underworld. I don't know why Britt depends on Lenore so much when he's got a seasoned pro in his newspaper's Editor-in-Chief, Mike Axford (Edward James Olmos). I don't really see the point in the Lenore character, at all.

She's not a love interest for either character in the film, because she never expresses even a vague interest in either Britt or Kato. Nothing she tells our heroes is particularly obscure information. I'm sure if they ever bothered to ask Max anything relating to criminal strategies, he'd be more than willing to share. Lenore's only real contributions to the film are a handful of painfully unfunny scenes involving Britt and Kato bumbling about, vying for her affection. She's completely superfluous. It's not enough just to hire an actress and give her a role in your film. You actually have to give her character something to do.

So instead of having our heroes conferring with Edward James Olmos' older, Morgan Freeman-esque mentor figure, we're left with Cameron Diaz, an actress who hasn't elicited an emotional reaction stronger than pure apathy from me since There's Something About Mary. Good job, guys!

As the legend of the Green Hornet and his nameless Asian companion spread throughout the underworld, mostly through our heroes blowing shit up with rockets, causing flaming debris to crush random bad guys to death, old Chudnofsky, a forelorn bastard if I've ever seen one (and I have! I look in the mirror to brush my teeth every day!), decides he needs some kind of gimmick to stay relevant in the age of Facebook. Inspired by the Green Hornet, he adopts the mantle of "Bloodnofsky", dressing all in red, donning a crimson gasmask and spouting off a ridiculous blood-related catchphrase. He does this all without ever raising his voice or energy level.

This is another point the film just fumbles: the idea of escalation. When you've got a couple of kitted-out masked vigilantes out there, fucking shit up for the criminals, the criminals have to adapt. Bigger, bolder, badder, right? But after Chudnofsky becomes Bloodnofsky, he doesn't really change his tactics at all. He's still a sad criminal bastard, but now he's a sad criminal bastard wearing a sharp red suit. It's a disappointment.

In fact, the Chudnofsky character is a disappointment. Christoph Waltz, who was electric in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, just seems lost in this movie, like he doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing. Maybe he was going for "subdued", but it just doesn't work. There's no energy in his performance. He's inert. I suppose I was expecting more from the man who amazed me in his previous Academy Award-winning performance. But at least he's carrying on the tradition of actors making bad choices after winning the Oscar.

Am I done yet? Oh shit, I still have more plot to recap.

We reach the obligatory point in the movie where Britt and Kato break up the band. Britt, being an egomaniacal douchebag, insists that Kato, the man who does everything, is nothing more than his ass-kicking sidekick. Ass-kicking Sidekick. Good band name? Eh... Anyhoo, they get into a fight, Kato tears off on his motorcycle, and the third act begins. Thank God, I've made it to the third act.

Britt learns from the crooked District Attorney that dear old dad wasn't killed by an errant bee, but was poisoned for thumbing his nose at the idea of taking bribes to keep high-profile crime stories out of his paper. He played ball for a number of years to keep his reporters from getting bumped off, but in the end I guess he watched Network and decided that he was mad as Hell, and he wasn't going to take it anymore. So Britt and Kato team up to take out Bloodnofsky and reveal the District Attorney's treachery to the world.

Britt finally gets a bright idea, wearing a wire to record the DA's confession, but because he's an idiot, he fails to record the conversation. With Plan A out the window, he and Kato decide it would be better just to kill the District Attorney by dropping him from a great height onto the ciy streets. And Bloodnofsky meets his untimely end when Kato jams chairlegs into his eyesockets. Their lust for murder sated for the evening, Britt and Kato visit the graveyard once more, repairing daddy's statue and exchanging witty banter.

So that's The Green Hornet. And despite my issues, I actually enjoyed the film. I was pleasantly surprised.

Seth Rogen didn't even try to pull off a truly heroic character, aside from a brief moment during the film's climactic battle, which is ruined by his character's own incompetence. Mostly he plays a narcissistic buffoon desperate to live out his childhood fantasies of superheroism. His Britt Reid is never a terribly likeable fellow, which makes sense considering he was raised by his douchebag father. I like Rogen's approach. He means well, trying to clean up the streets, but his ego keeps getting in the way.

Luckily he has Kato to make him look good. Jay Chou, a dude I've never heard of (apparently he's like the Justin Timberlake of Taiwan), is funny, charming, and despite the fact that he is not a martial artist and merely learned the fight choreography for the film, made me believe that he knew what he was doing. I'm glad Gondry and Rogen found this guy, because he's the real reason why this movie works. A soft-spoken genius who can kick the shit out of you then make the greatest cappucino you will ever have, Kato is great.

Mostly, I liked that the Green Hornet and Kato aren't superheroes. They're vigilantes. They actually kill the bad guys. That's pretty interesting to me. I was surprised that the film's villains didn't end up in jail, but six feet under. A lovely change of pace, I say.

My favorite scene in the movie involves the introduction of the Green Hornet's gas gun. Kato presents this weapon to Britt, concerned that without some kind of advantage his uncoordinated partner won't last long in their war on crime. Britt accidentally discharges the gun in his own face, and immediately passes out. You've all seen this in the trailer. Funny, right? Eh. But it gets better!

Britt comes to in his bed, a saline IV attached to his arm and a suspiciously thick five o'clock shadow on his face. He wanders around, eventually discovering Kato tinkering with his inventions. To his horror, Britt discovers that the prototype gas gun put him in a coma for nearly two weeks, and that Kato has replaced his underwear with an adult diaper. Presenting the new, improved gas gun to Britt, Kato promises that he has perfected the sleep gas formula, and that it will wear off within a few hours.

So Britt promptly shoots Kato in the face. I thought it was hilarious.

So I enjoyed The Green Hornet. I was on the fence about the movie for a long time. I thought the trailers were underwhelming, and the cast didn't fill me with confidence. But in the end, I had a good time. It has its faults, but it's not bad. Not bad at all. I also saw it in IMAX 3D, which helped. The post-conversion 3D wasn't terrible, which shocked me. It was underwhelming at times, resembling a giant pop-up book more than once, but overall, I was pleased.

Now that I'm finally finished with this review, I can get back to my true passion: beard grooming.

P.S. -  I might have something to talk about on this blog sometime in the not-too-distant future. Maybe. You've been warned.