The Green Hornet (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Michel Gondry. Starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz.
Superhero comedy with low aspirations.
The old Green Hornet radio series and TV show was about the adventures of masked crimefighter Britt Reid and his friend Kato, who did most of the duo's fighting, driving, and gadget-making, but was just a little too Asian to be called anything but "sidekick."
Blatant racism might have been all the rage in the '60s, but when writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg looked at making a modern-day update of the franchise, they were sharp enough to realize that this arrangement wouldn't fly so well anymore. Their solution: make Britt Reid (played by Rogen) into a spoiled idiot only barely tolerated by Kato (Jay Chou), and make the film into a jackass comedy.
To the viewer, this seems like a good idea until you realize that Rogen is going to act this way for the entire movie. Then it starts to wear very thin.
The story begins when Reid, after the death of his media magnate father, spends a drunken night on the town with his father's old mechanic, Kato. The pair of them (i.e. just Kato) end up fighting off a gang of thugs, causing Reid to declare, "We should do this every night!"
This makes sense because he is a moron. What doesn't make sense is that Kato agrees with him.
The film thus becomes literally scene after scene of a rich brat and his buddy driving around Los Angeles beating up and killing criminals for a thrill. When a plot eventually congeals from the scattered blood and body parts, rest assured it's a weak one.
The film attracted a strangely good supporting cast, including Edward James Olmos, James Franco, and Christoph Waltz. As the villain, Waltz looks sort of like he forgot that he agreed to appear in the movie, stumbled in after getting a call on the morning of the shoot, and told the director "I'm giving you one take for each line, and then I'm going home." That's not to say he's sloppy, but he isn't entirely present.
And he's not alone: a sense of apathy permeates almost everything about the film. Mostly it makes the show feel like a production by a bunch of college buddies with a camera and a lot of money, but occasionally it lets the filmmakers defy the expectations of the genre in a positive way. I'll say this: The Green Hornet does things that no other superhero movie has done.
Rated PG-13 for really quite a lot of violence.
2.5 out of 5
The Dilemma (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Ron Howard. Starring Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Jennifer Connelly.
Restrained comedy that's better than it sounds but worse than it tries to be.
Vince Vaughn and Kevin James play two partners in an auto design firm who are inexplicably in relationships with Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder. During crunch time on a project that will make or break their career futures, Vaughn discovers that James's wife (Ryder) is cheating on him. For obvious reasons.
The dilemma of the title is Vaughn's character's decision whether to tell his friend immediately and likely sink the project, or wait while the consequences of delaying get worse by the day.
How does a premise this mundane fill an entire movie? Partly through an above-average script that achieves a fair balance between comedy and melodrama. Mostly, though, it's through the old movie fallback of having the main character do incredibly stupid things that make the situation far more complicated than it needs to be. As the climax nears, many of Vaughn's actions have no apparent purpose except to humiliate himself.
Extraordinary numbers of long heart-to-heart speeches take up the other half of the running time. The characters of this movie work through more issues than an entire season of Full House.
For Vaughn and James, who have built their careers on the backs of bad movies, this is a respectable attempt at a grown-up comedy. But it's not a high point for Ron Howard.
Rated PG-13 for destruction of expensive property.
3 out of 5
