The Green Hornet

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. (06/13/2011)

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. (01/14/2011)

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. (05/15/2011)

For me, a massively pleasant surprise. Green Hornet was a lot of fun, both with the straightforward jokes and with the way it mocks itself (when the villain puts on a red robe and a gas mask is just hilarious… though not everyone will share that opinion) and other films in the genre (the ending similar to the fateful conclusion of The Dark Night). Gondry made it incredibly brisk and playful, like the fooling around of boys unbound by ethics. And the reflection on how the media manipulates with public opinion is not as cheap as you would expect from a comic-book film. I watched it in 2D, I don’t think the 3D version could be any better. (01/19/2011)

I must say that I definitely expected a bit more from this movie than what I ultimately got, but in the end, it's not that terrible. It's just not that exceptional either. Christoph Waltz is absolutely excellent, and it's great that he can make fun of himself a bit. Seth Rogen doesn't stand out in this and is rather annoying. I was quite surprised that Michel Gondry's direction is too much influenced by the genre. It resulted in a rather unremarkable work that will probably go unnoticed. (02/27/2014)