The Green Hornet Review


January is an infamous month for movies. It arrives just after the holiday rush, and months before the blockbuster summer season. It’s often where companies plop the movies they believe will be duds. It’s for this reason that The Green Hornet shines. After being repeatedly delayed, the film finally released in cinemas on January 14th, and proved that the month doesn’t have to be a garbage can for movies. The film is centered around Brett Reid, the lazy, twenty-something son of a millionaire Los Angeles newspaper owner living in his father’s shadow. When his dad dies, Brett is left in charge of his father’s media empire, and immediately finds himself overwhelmed. He longs for a life of thrills and excitement, so he teams up with his father’s old mechanic Kato and sets out to fight the city’s crime under the pseudonym “The Green Hornet”.

The set-up sounds ridiculous, and that’s because it is. The film is based off of a 1930’s radio serial of the same name, but the filmmakers have melded the formula to fit with the modern world. This leaves room for some pretty crazy action set-pieces and some very over-the-top character personalities. It’s a little dizzying at times, but it’s also extremely entertaining. During some of the action scenes, there was so much going on at once that I literally forgot who was who, and who was on whose side. Though this sometimes takes away from the overall experience, it never downright destroys it, and even in the most convoluted of the action sequences, I was still being entertained. That doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t have some problems, though. The pacing was a little off, in that there are chunks of the film in which almost nothing happens, but then the filmmakers realized that they needed to explain what was going on, so they’d cram in a little two-minute explanatory fragment that still left me scratching my head half the time. 

However, the film does have some undeniably great elements. Seth Rogen plays his role as a troubled inheritor mixed with a likable everyman very well, and Jay Chou gives a career-making performance in his role as the awesome sidekick. It’s also nice to have Cameron Diaz’s familiar face, but Christopher Waltz is unsuccessful and at times utterly bizarre in his role as a power-hungry mob leader. The movie also manages to make the audience truly like and feel for the characters by the end of the movie, and there was a moment in the movie, I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll just say a turning-point for Rogen’s character, where some of the audience literally cheered. It’s a fun experience to see a movie that manages to capture this essence in a mere two hours, and although The Green Hornet may not soar to the heights of rival superhero sagas, it manages to make a memorable name for itself in today’s convoluted movie market. 
Final Score:
7.0/10
"Good"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Music as a time machine

Image
By Isaac Handelman A few months ago, near the beginning of my time in college, in a fit of what might have been homesickness coupled with my unshakable sentimentality, I set to work compiling a Spotify playlist encapsulating my senior year in high school. I happened upon this idea because I’d been thinking a lot about the ability of certain songs, when played, to transport me back to the times in my life that I associate them with. My plan was to compile every song that had meant something to me over the course of my senior year (a collection that turned out to consist of about 120 distinct tracks) and order them chronologically by the specific time or event in my life for which they held meaning and/or significance. I soon found the task daunting -- after all, certain songs were associated with foggier feelings or memories than others, and were difficult to place in order -- and I gave up. But my reason for setting out on this endeavor still holds truth: music has a certai
Read more

The Conjuring Review

Image
Over-hyped or truly malevolent? Full review by Isaac Handelman Few horror films in recent memory have inspired the sort of hype and attention that The Conjuring has. And who could blame the public for this? The film’s R-rating has been publicly declared to be due to the fact that the film was “too scary” for a PG-13. Some theatres have gone so far as to display signs outside of Conjuring showings warning that some may find it “too scary”. Stories abound of viewers who had to vacate the theater shortly into the proceedings because they were “too scared”. In the end, perhaps the hype has led viewers to expect the film to be too scary for its own good. The Conjuring contains no shortage of slick scares, but it’s hardly the revolution in mainstream horror that some have made it out to be. Conjuring claims to be based on the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, a pair of paranormal investigators (or “demonologists”) who agree to assist the Parrens in cleansing their new house of
Read more

Frozen Review

Image
Thawed. Full review by Isaac Handelman Many parallels can be drawn between Disney's latest entry in their animated canon, Frozen , and the studio's 2010 offering, Tangled : both center on quirky female protagonists, both are fresh takes on classic fairy tales, both feature some sort of large four-legged mammal as comic relief; heck, the two films even both posses bi-syllabic, single-word adjectives for titles. Perhaps these similarities are by sheer coincidence, but they nonetheless caused me to hold Frozen up to the high standard of its predecessor -- a standard that the film ultimately fails to live up to. It's not a bad film per se, but Frozen too often feels as if it's missing that spark of ingenuity that made Tangled such an entertaining ride. In Frozen, Princess Anna takes center stage, voiced well by Kristen Bell. Anna sets out on a quest to find her runaway sister, Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel), whose mystical ice powers have covered the kingdom in an eternal
Read more