There are some pretty monumental hurdles the film has to get over however. For starters, this is no mere remake of a forgotten 60’s TV show; the Green Hornet’s influence is very much alive and kicking, especially if the heavy references in QT’s Kill Bill Vol.1 are anything to go by. This point brings me to The Green Hornet’s second, and possibly biggest, hurdle – kung-fu sidekick Kato. The original show, and by proxy the film also, is really all about Kato (a role made famous by none other than a young Bruce Lee); so actor Jay Chou has some undeniably gargantuan shoes to fill. Chou does admirably, displaying a fun on-screen presence and decent comic timing, and the unstoppable Kato is still the coolest thing on screen but the relationship between him and Rogen’s Green Hornet is less Batman and Robin and more Inspector Closeau and Cato Fong from the Pink Panther movies. This really is the folly of the whole movie, much more than the sluggish middle-section, the criminally underwritten villain and patchy script. The Green Hornet, self-admittedly, has no idea where it’s going; as Seth Rogen's Hornet, astutely and hilaraiously puts it, "Confused? You should be!". The ideas riff more on contemporary comic adaptations than on its source material; Rogen is still completely on his A-game, delivering some genuine laughs with a fun bromance between him and Kato, but it lacks the clear sense of drive and purpose that make superhero movies so great. It’s bookended by some great action-comedy scenes, but this is less like the fun Scott Pilgrim-esque romp we were expecting and more like what would happen if Judd Apatow made Batman Begins.
5/10
Lots of madness with little method.
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