Green Hornet Review (Spoiler Free)

I got to see a sneak preview of this Tuesday night, and since the movie is still well over 2 weeks away. I'm going to do my best to review this without giving anything away.

Lets just get this out of the way now. Its not a classic Green Hornet film.  Its a comedy, but a fun action comedy.  Seth Rogen as Britt Reid aka Green Hornet and Jay Chou as Kato have become more of a comedy duo with slight crime fighting thrown in.  The villain is played by Christoph Waltz who also played a great Nazi villain in Tarentino's Inglorious Basterds and again he plays the character very well, but this time probably not given enough screen time to make the character great.  The last main character is Cameron Diaz's Lenore Case, and I'm not a big fan of her of the choice for her in this movie, but its not too bad in the end.  Finally is Tom Wilkinson who plays, James Reid, Britt Reid's Father in the movie.  Wilkinson doesn't have a large part, but he seems to do alright with his few lines in the beginning of the movie.

One of my favorite parts in the movie is some Bruce Lee recognition early on in the movie.  As some of you may know, Bruce Lee played Kato in the original Green Hornet TV Show from the 60s.  I won't say how it happens, but you can't miss it.  Kato is a great character, and has always been a change up from the traditional hero/sidekick.  Kato is the fighter, and inventor of weapons, and Green Hornet just uses these inventions and throws a few punches here and there.  It has always been some of the running jokes in series.

Green Hornet has always been about removing organized crime from the city, and this movie is no different.  Waltz's character, Chudnosfsky is a crime lord trying to take over all of Los Angeles, but Britt Reid decides he is going to trying and stop this by taking over parts of it himself, but what seems for all of the wrong reasons.  It is under the guise of helping people, and they do start off because someone was in danger, but in does kind of feel more like "fun" instead of something a bit more meaningful.

Micheal Gondry is an odd choice for the director for this movie, but it was alright. The only real problem was the end seemed a bit too drawn out, and that could have been a combination of script and directing.  They added in a bit of slow-motion "bullet time" effect for Kato's fighting, and when I first saw it I was annoyed, but by the end, the used it so infrequent it was nearly as bad as I was expecting.

In the end, this movie is fun, and you will spend a large part of this movie laughing.  There is some very good rapport between Rogen and Chou that works perfectly for this movie. Rogen wrote and stared in the movie.  He writes funny movies, and if you don't like him that much, this movie has a lot of him in it, so it might not be the movie for you.

Conclusion:

All you need to know is that this is a good comedy movie, and a good action movie, but this is not a great movie.  Still, I suggest watching, if not in the theaters, definitely dvd/blu-ray/netflix.