The Green Hornet

The Green Hornet may not have the crazy grit and "comic-book" flair of Kick-Ass, but it has an excellent bad guy (on a par with Mark Strong in Kick-Ass in terms of quality), precise Snyder-esque visuals, and Seth Rogen, who wrote a perfectly funny script and does a great job playing the main character just as comically as well. Michel Gondry's handwriting isn't lost in what for him is such an uncharacteristic genre, so all in all this is a popcorn film on a solid level. (19/01/2011)

Funny, quite solid action and an imaginative change of the superhero scheme. The heroes of The Green Hornet do not rely on the power of the mask and try to handle the symbolic power through a controlled newspaper - the result is extremely refreshing. Though transparent in places, The Green Hornet turns into a very exciting and epicurean spectacle thanks to a few twists and an inevitable sense of trouble behind an otherwise teenage ride. Add to that Gondry's poetic inserts, the excellent Waltz (the guy waltzes again!), a fresh heroic duo and a pleasant tribute to The Pink Panther, we soon have a candidate for this year's best blockbuster. Minuses: unnecessary 3D that looks like a children’s concertina book, and also that The Green Hornet does not have a completely balanced pace. That's why it loses half a star from me compared to last year’s Kick-ass. (11/01/2011)

I've been feeling lately that I’m giving harsher reviews. I guess it's because I've gotten a whiff of South Korean filmmaking. It's set the bar pretty high. But to the rating… I like the duo of Rogen and Chou, but it hasn’t got enough action for and action film and not funny enough for a comedy. Cameron Diaz played a completely unnecessary role. I guess this was just a name to catch moviegoers at the movies. The ending was pretty much a big "humbug", so 3.5 stars. (14/06/2011)

Yup, the hillbilly rhetoric and horny teenager humor are more or less Rogen's trademark, which is certainly not a complaint by me. However, the script full of infantile humor is tamed by Gondry in the end. He put the perfect stamp of exaggeration on it and turned all that instantaneous crap into a perfect hit, which pleases especially during the action, when playfulness, original ideas, and wit are combined. No, this wasn't supposed to be the second Kick-Ass, but it definitely is the third Iron Man. (15/01/2011)

An incredibly empty, boring and stupid film. Really. The protagonist is even more unsympathetic than Peter Spiderman Parker, the script is even more uninteresting than Fantastic Four (and that's saying something), and Christoph Waltz's villain is absolutely bland (the biggest disappointment). I'm also strongly allergic to the downright American wannabe humor used here, the visual effects are decent, but 90% of them are completely unnecessary (Kato's "cool" opening of the beer bottles as an example), and the music is inappropriate and distracting (I mean the song soundtrack, I didn't even notice Newton Howard's score)... The Green Hornet is quite possibly the worst comic book movie I've ever seen, and I couldn't really find anything about it (I never liked Cameron Diaz) that would let me give it at least a star. And I doubt that 3D in the movie theatre would have made any difference. I'm sorry. (16/05/2011)