The Green Hornet (2010) 
 
 “The Green Hornet,” based on an ancient and much-adapted radio serial, with Seth Rogen in the title role and Michel Gondry behind the camera, is quite a bit less than the sum of its appealing parts. 
 
 Mr. Rogen, who wrote the screenplay with Evan Goldberg, his collaborator on “Superbad,” is slimmer than he was in “Knocked Up” but, if anything, more manic in his goofiness. He provides “The Green Hornet” with self-conscious, rapid-fire humor, playing the title character and his rich-boy slacker alter ego, Britt Reid, as yet another underachieving man-child just innocent enough in his playboy self-delusions to be likable. 
 
 Mr. Gondry, a visual artisan of unmatched ingenuity, brings some of his trademark handmade whimsy to this, his first foray into franchise filmmaking, conventional action and newfangled 3-D. But the dull commercial imperatives of the genre overpower both his homespun surrealist wit and Mr. Rogen’s coarse, anarchic humor. “The Green Hornet” is not terrible, just pointless, and it offers further proof that superheroism is, at least for now, pretty well tapped out as a vein of lucrative pop-cultural bounty. 
 
 In retrospect it seems clear that we arrived at what ecologists might call Peak Superhero around the summer of 2008, when “The Dark Knight” inflamed not only passionate comics geeks but also skeptical cinephiles with its brooding mix of horror, vengeance and digital bravado. Even before that, though, big-screen chronicles of caped crime fighters were exhibiting the parodic self-consciousness that is a sure sign of decadence, even as movies like “The Incredibles” and “Hancock” were able to use the familiarity of the form as a platform for fresh ingenuity. 
 
 By now the winks of costumed avengers have become as tired as their glowers and righteous beat-downs. Last year we had “Kick-Ass,” “Iron Man 2,” “Despicable Me” and “Megamind,” each in its way trying for the kind of knowing, have-it-both-ways blend of allegory, action and gentle satire. 
 
 “The Green Hornet” adds nothing significantly new to the formula. What distinction it has can be found mostly in filigree and detail, as well as in the central relationship between hero and sidekick. Before his half-accidental transformation into the Green Hornet, Britt is the underappreciated son of a newspaper publisher (Tom Wilkinson), and the principal joke of the movie is that even when endowed with a mask, a pimped-out car and a catchy moniker, Britt still lacks both basic crime-fighting skills and elementary common sense. The brains, the combat training and the hair-trigger bravery all belong to Kato (Jay Chou), who in an earlier era would have been called Britt’s manservant. The proper term nowadays would be bromantic interest. 
 
 Mr. Rogen and Mr. Chou have a loose, kinetic chemistry. Their verbal riffing is amusing in spite of Mr. Chou’s heavy accent and slow delivery, and they also demonstrate a lively physical rapport, aided by Mr. Gondry’s stop-and-start editing and his knack for hand-to-hand action. The best scene is a fistfight that caroms through Britt’s mansion, laying waste to a whole Sharper Image catalog’s worth of bachelor playthings. It is shot and staged with an old-school slapstick attention to detail and surprise, showing exactly the kind of care that is missing from the noisier, duller car chases and shootouts. 
 
 Still, even those, tedious though they are, show a few Gondryesque touches, like a flash drive in the shape of a piece of sushi and a chopped-up car plowing through cubicle partitions. The director’s use of the architecture and machinery of a newspaper headquarters — the kind where the presses and the offices occupy the same space; the kind very few of us work in anymore — demonstrates his affectionate interest in old technologies. That fondness, given fullest expression in “Be Kind Rewind” and brilliantly married with digital inventiveness in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and many music videos, struggles to find a foothold in a story with very little room for poetry. 
 
 Or for Cameron Diaz, who plays secondary sidekick as well as the mother figure and the object of just enough lust to allay any anxieties that Britt and Kato might not be straight. Ms. Diaz, a perpetual good sport, does her best, as does Christoph Waltz as the main villain and David Harbour as the district attorney who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a secondary villain. 
 
 The car and the mask, always the coolest things about the Green Hornet, are still pretty cool, but Mr. Rogen and Mr. Chou have more fun playing with the toys that Mr. Gondry has supplied them than you are likely to have watching the game. 
 
 “The Green Hornet” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A surprisingly high body- and naughty-word count. 
 
 THE GREEN HORNET 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Directed by Michel Gondry; written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, based on “The Green Hornet” radio series created by George W. Trendle; director of photography, John Schwartzman; edited by Michael Tronick; music by James Newton Howard; production design by Owen Paterson; costumes by Kym Barrett; produced by Neal H. Moritz; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Seth Rogen (Britt Reid/the Green Hornet), Jay Chou (Kato), Cameron Diaz (Lenore Case), Christoph Waltz (Chudnofsky), Edward James Olmos (Axford), David Harbour (Scanlon) and Tom Wilkinson (James Reid). ||||| The Green Hornet 
 
 January 12, 2011 
 
 "The Green Hornet" is an almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about. Although it follows the rough storyline of previous versions of the title, it neglects the construction of a plot engine to pull us through. There are pointless dialogue scenes going nowhere much too slowly, and then pointless action scenes going everywhere much too quickly. 
 
 Seth Rogen deserves much of the blame. He co-wrote the screenplay, giving himself way too many words, and then hurls them tirelessly at us at a modified shout. He plays Britt Reid, a spoiled little rich brat who grows up the same way, as the son of a millionaire newspaper publisher (Tom Wilkinson, who apparently remains the same age as his son ages from about 10 to maybe 30). After his father's death, he shows little interest in running a newspaper, but bonds with Kato (Jay Chou), his father's auto mechanic and coffee maker. Yes. 
 
 
 
 Kato is the role Bruce Lee played on the TV series. Jay Chou is no Bruce Lee, but it's hard to judge him as an actor with Rogen hyperventilating through scene after scene. Together, they devise a damn-fool plan to fight crime by impersonating a criminal (The Green Hornet) and his sidekick. This they do while wearing masks that serve no purpose as far as I could determine, except to make them look suspicious. I mean, like, who wears a mask much these days? 
 
 
 
 The crime lord in the city is Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz, the Oscar winner from “Inglourious Basterds”). That provides the movie with a villain but hardly with a character. 
 
 
 
 The war between Chudnofsky and the Hornet is played out in a great many vehicle stunts and explosions, which go on and on and on, maddeningly, as if screenwriter Rogen tired of his own dialogue (not as quickly as we do, alas) and scribbled in: Here second unit supplies nine minutes of CGI action. 
 
 
 
 There is a role in the film for Cameron Diaz as Lenore Case, would-be secretary for young Reid, but nothing for her to do. She functions primarily to allow the camera to cut to her from time to time, which is pleasant but unsatisfying. Diaz has a famously wonderful smile, and curiously in her first shot in the film, she smiles for no reason at all, maybe just to enter the smile on the record. 
 
 
 
 The director of this half-cooked mess is Michel Gondry, whose “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is as good as this one is bad. Casting about for something to praise, I recalled that I heard a strange and unique sound for the first time, a high-pitched whooshing scream, but I don't think Gondry can claim it, because it came from the hand dryers in the nearby men's room. 
 
 
 
 Note: Yes, it was in 3-D. The more I see of the process, the more I think of it as a way to charge extra for a dim picture. ||||| The new film adaptation of “The Green Hornet’’ raises a few intriguing questions. What if a superhero didn’t just pretend to be a loud, obnoxious creep as part of his secret identity but really was a loud, obnoxious creep? What if his sidekick turned out to have all the talent? And what would happen if the slaphappy French filmmaker Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’’ “Be Kind Rewind’’) tackled a big-money action extravaganza? 
 
 We have our answers. The first half of “Green Hornet’’ undermines every promise a superhero movie is supposed to make with genuinely subversive comic verve. It’s off-putting, rude, misshapen, and more often than not hysterically funny. The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck. 
 
 A lot of people are going to be offended, and I can’t say I blame them: The movie waves its hero’s boorishness like a red flag. Co-writer/star Seth Rogen takes the classic archetype of the playboy by day/masked avenger by night — from Batman to Iron Man an established source of Hollywood profits — and reveals him for a braying sociopath. In this telling, pampered newspaper heir Britt Reid is an idiot getting by on his money and on the mad skills of his employee and new BFF, Kato (Taiwanese pop singer Jay Chou, arriving in the US pop arena with a deft three-point landing). 
 
 Why the revisionism? In part, because the Green Hornet was always the superhero equivalent of an independent vendor, created for radio in the 1930s and showing up in movie serials and on TV (the 1966 series costarred Bruce Lee as Kato). The character isn’t owned by Marvel or DC, so he’s a free agent — fair game for the anarchic likes of Kevin Smith (the “Clerks’’ director took a whack at a Hornet script that never got made), Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg, and Gondry, whose marvelously rickety shaggy-dog contraptions are as far from Marvel’s sleek money machines as you can get. 
 
 So “The Green Hornet’’ is a series of comic riffs — not so much a parody but, like Gondry’s “Be Kind Rewind,’’ a tale of two boobs running with a bad idea until it turns unexpectedly excellent. Having lost his disapproving white-knight father (Tom Wilkinson) to a mysterious bee sting, Britt bonds with dad’s Chinese mechanic over the merits of the perfect latte and drastically retooled foreign cars. What starts as a drunken prank becomes a bumptious career in crime-fighting — wholly ridiculous until LA’s preening Mr. Big (Christoph Waltz, cashing his “Inglourious Basterds’’ Oscar win with a shrug) decides to fight back. 
 
 If you get into its off-kilter rhythms, the movie’s first hour can be startlingly funny, with the contrast between Kato’s efficiency and Britt’s general uselessness milked for all its worth. (The Green Hornet’s gas-bomb pistol, it turns out, is invented only because the hero can’t be trusted with a real gun.) There are two ways to play the Asian-manservant thing: Either treat it as a politically incorrect no-flyover zone or dig right into its racially loaded contradictions. Gondry and his stars dig, wickedly dismantling the master-servant dynamic in favor of boss-employee, then buddy-buddy, then rival-rival, and finally something like unequal partners, Kato being slightly more equal than Britt. 
 
 There’s a very tenuous plot — something involving the crime boss and a slick district attorney (David Harbour) — but the filmmakers aren’t interested. It’s like they got up in the morning with the vague idea of making a superhero film and here it is the mid-afternoon and they haven’t got around to it yet. So they turn up the heat: After a ridiculous room-trashing fistfight between the hero and his sidekick (about as ridiculous as the similar fight in “Iron Man 2’’), “The Green Hornet’’ devolves into an overlong, confusingly shot demolition derby. What starts as a lark turns into a headache. 
 
 Did I mention that the movie’s in 3-D? Someone should have let Gondry know. Except for a few swooping highway scenes and one eye-dazzling multi-split-screen montage — each panel taking place at a different depth — “Hornet’’ could have and should have been shot in two dimensions. (If there’s satire there, it’s at the consumer’s expense.) But the entire movie’s a flip-off in a sense, sustained by its playful spirits and love of anarchy until the whole thing comes crashing down. In the end, there are only two special effects on display: Chou, with his charismatic bad-boy cool, and Rogen, who scrawls all over the movie like a baby with a crayon. 
 
 Because superhero movies have to feature a Girl, Cameron Diaz turns up as Lenore Case, Britt’s overeducated secretary at the newspaper. She’s his Pepper Potts, except that Pepper eventually melts while Lenore takes one look at these two and can’t be bothered. The role’s disposable and intentionally rather cruel. Chou plays his role as something of a brat, too, and so does Waltz, whose character decides in the third act that he isn’t scary enough and gives himself a super-makeover. “The Green Hornet’’ paints heroes and villains alike as emotionally needy little boys playing dress-up with live ammunition. If the movie works for you at all, you’ll never look at the Dark Knight the same again. 
 
 Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. To follow him, go to www.twitter.com/tyburr. 
 
 © Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company. ||||| Harnessing the power of humor 
 
 By Dan Kois 
 
 Friday, January 14, 2010 
 
 This morning, the unconscious bodies of three pickpockets were found on the front steps of The Washington Post's offices. Safety-pinned to one was an envelope containing the following movie review. 
 
 Yeah, I think you know who I am. Big guy. Wear a mask. I protect the innocent of Gotham from the garbage who pollute the streets with violence. 
 
 That's right. I'm Batman. 
 
 But now there's another masked vigilante on the streets. Calls himself the Green Hornet. He's taking over Los Angeles. There's a movie out about him right now. It's called "The Green Hornet." Obviously. 
 
 It gets my bat wings all riled up. Let me tell you why. 
 
 There was a time when movies about superheroes were dark and full of angst. Like "The Dark Knight." You know just from the title what that movie's gonna be like. Broody. Angsty. I'll be doing a lot of thinking on rooftops, you know, about justice and whatever. Maybe the girl I love gets blown up. 
 
 Then this johnny-come-lately shows up. This punk, the Green Hornet. His movie's fun. It's light-hearted. It's full of jokes. Jokes! My enemies tell jokes. Riddles, whatnot. Heroes don't tell jokes. Heroes keep it grim. Saving people is serious business. 
 
 When they made a movie about me, they hired Christian Bale to play me. Serious guy. Serious actor. Intense. So who plays the Green Hornet? Seth Rogen. A jokester. A funnyman. A Canadian, for Pete's sake. Sure, they had him do some crunches, but still, it just points to a real lack of seriousness in this movie. 
 
 Just as an example, when I'm weaving the Batmobile through the streets of Gotham, with explosions and gunfire on every side, I keep my trap shut. Maybe I utter a single quip through gritted teeth after I capture the bad guys with my Batarang. 
 
 But this Green Hornet guy? "This is awesome!" he yells. "Oh man, now we're in a car chase!" 
 
 What is this, amateur hour? 
 
 I was prepared to like this Green Hornet kid. We have a lot in common. Take his secret identity. Britt Reid's a millionaire playboy, which struck a chord, although his tastes run less toward tuxedos and fine art and more toward parties drenched in beer and Silly String. Like a certain superhero I know, he loses a parent unexpectedly; when his father, played by Tom Wilkinson, dies, Britt inherits his mansion, his garage full of luxury cars, and the newspaper he edited for years. (Yeah, I thought newspaper editors drove Hondas, not Rolls-Royces, but that's Hollywood, I guess.) 
 
 But does Britt Reid seethe about the death of his father? Is he filled with rage? No! He resented the old man, so he saws the head off his dad's memorial statue. What kind of hero does that? 
 
 Look, I will grudgingly admit that much of the movie was really funny. Sure, I didn't laugh - in lieu of laughter, I emit a harsh sound like a dog's cough - but all around me, the crowd really seemed to be enjoying themselves. Rogen and Jay Chou, the charismatic Taiwanese pop star who plays Britt's partner, Kato, have real chemistry. The movie somehow manages not to marginalize or insult Kato, a character who in the early "Hornet" radio serials was something of an offensive Asian caricature. (What! I've been thinking about getting a sidekick, so I did some research.) 
 
 In fact, Kato's often the best part of the movie. Britt calls him a "human Swiss army knife," and he's right; Kato is not a sidekick, but a fully formed hero who's full of surprises. And the gadgets he develops for the Hornet's sweet ride (a souped-up '65 Chrysler Imperial, respect) are pretty sweet. I've been thinking the Batmobile could use a fax machine and a turntable. 
 
 But really, I just want to make it clear that I am personally offended that someone would make a silly superhero movie. That's unacceptable. They couldn't even get a dark and complicated director such as Christopher Nolan to direct it; instead, it's directed by Michel Gondry. Michel Gondry! The Frenchman who directed "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and those White Stripes videos! How is that appropriate? 
 
 True, some of the handmade effects in which Gondry specializes work well in "The Green Hornet," dramatizing how Kato, for instance, can beat five guys up at once. And I guess that maybe Gondry's easygoing comic spirit is a better match for a movie like this than Nolan, who proved triumphantly with "Inception" that you can make a gigantic hit movie that contains zero jokes. (I loved it! I saw it four times, and asked Lucius Fox to start developing that dream technology for Wayne Industries.) 
 
 And what about the villains? My most recent nemesis was a crazed murderer whose ruthless anti-philosophy shook me, and the city, to the very core. Chudnofsky, the villain in "The Green Hornet" - played by Christoph Waltz - is having a midlife crisis. That's not serious! 
 
 Sigh. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Or, in this case, a joke. Well, let me employ sarcasm: Well done, Seth Rogen and Michel Gondry. You made a superhero movie for people who thought "The Dark Knight" needed to lighten up. That's so funny I forgot to laugh. 
 
 No, seriously, I forgot to laugh. I actually don't know how. Alfred? 
 
 Contains violent action, language, sensuality and drug content.
– A handful of critics enjoyed Seth Rogen's bumbling reinvention of Green Hornet—but only a handful. The movie's currently at 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, though to be fair, audiences liked it a fair bit more (71%). Here's what they're saying: The first half of the movie has a “genuinely subversive comic verve” painting “heroes and villains alike as emotionally needy little boys playing dress-up with live ammunition,” writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. “The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck.” Roger Ebert hated it, calling it “almost unendurable” in the Chicago Sun-Times. He blames Seth Rogen, “who co-wrote the screenplay, giving himself way too many words, and then hurls them tirelessly at us at a modified shout.” “The Green Hornet is not terrible, just pointless,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times. “It offers further proof that superheroism is, at least for now, pretty well tapped out” as a movie subject. But Dan Kois of the Washington Post loved it—and wrote his review in the voice of Batman. “This punk, the Green Hornet. His movie's fun. It's light-hearted. It's full of jokes. Jokes! My enemies tell jokes. Riddles, whatnot,” the Dark Knight complains. “Heroes don't tell jokes.”