Review: The Green Hornet

Seth Rogen is a rich heir by day who doubles as a crime fighting vigilante with sweet gizmos and gadgets by night. Is any of this ringing a bell? Because it should be.

An overexcited Seth Rogen is very whiny, sometimes funny, as the iconic, newspaper heir Britt Reid who inherits his father's company after his sudden death. Jay Chou plays his late father's assistant turned sidekick for Rogen when the two of them decide to team up and fight crime by disguising themselves as villains.

Rogen and Chou work too well off each other in their characters' on-again-off-again relationship. The constant bickering between the two leads to scene after scene of of scolding each other and eventually a pretty funny fight scene, but they always make up in the end. This gets pretty tiring after a while, and eventually kills the movie. Cameron Diaz does a nice job as the straight,  uninterested love interest who causes some of the guys' fighting. Christoph Waltz plays the archenemy who probably draws the least amount of laughs while still giving a good performance as a crime lord who is obssessed with being scary.

Co-written by Seth Rogen, I knew this film would make me laugh, if only a few times here and there. However, the eventual lack of charisma on Jay Chou's part as Kato begins to take its toll when he, along with the audience, begins to realize Britt Reid's true character when he continually acts like a child and all the humor becomes overshadowed by the fact that this guy is real jerk. This feud gets so bad at times that it sucks all the engery right out of the film and you wonder why these two stick together in the first place.

The action is cool at first. Kato's terminator-style karate and his tank-like Chrystler with huge gatling guns, although familiar, I found  fun to watch for a while. As the movie dragged on, I found The Green Hornet to be nothing more than the same annoying car chase, drug bust, and bad guy beatdown over and over again.

Eventually, this all begins to swallow up the story. Actually, there is no real story; the villain never hatches a real diabolical plan. Instead, he just sends out wave after wave of criminals to kill the Green Hornet. This leads to relentless fight sequences that we're forced to sit and take it, along with the duo's constant bickering and Rogen's child-like jerk of a character.

Don't get me wrong, there are some good laughs to be had here and the action can be pretty entertaining at times; however, The Green Hornet fails to be a good superhero movie or even a plausible spoof of the genre.