Film Friday: The Green Hornet (2011)

The Green Hornet is a great example of what not to do when making a comic book movie. In fact, it’s a great example of what not to do when making any movie. It’s unpleasant. It’s stylistically confused. It suffers from horrid writing and confused direction. And it relies entirely on the comic talents of a man with no talent and less than no charisma.

** spoiler alert**

Bad Acting: Just about everything is wrong with The Green Hornet, but the biggest problem starts right at the top with Seth Rogen, who both stars as Britt Reid (The Green Hornet) and is a co-writer. Rogen is an awful actor. He has no charisma, no charm and no comedic timing. He roams this film acting either like a very unfunny, unclever, unlikeable Rodney Dangerfield or like he’s staring in Hot Tub Bachelor Party II: Maximum Jerk. Basically, he provides a machine-gun-like stream of whiny, selfish, angry, obnoxious and self-pitying dialog in every scene. No one else gets to finish a sentence before he interrupts and he never once says anything you will like or could possibly care about, much less respect. And he’s the hero.

There are other actors in the film as well, but not that you will notice.

Worse Writing: Rogen the writer is perhaps even worse than Rogen the actor. Despite Rogen’s intent to write Reid as a “loveable loser,” he is a worthless piece of sh~t. He fires people at a whim, he abuses his power, he is an idiot, he is an arrogant braggart, he all-but sexually assaults his secretary, and he treats his underlings and “friends” like they are garbage. Yet, as can only happen in a B-movie world, everyone continues to look up to him and wants to be his friend because that’s what the script calls for.

But don’t worry, all is forgiven because Seth offers us this cliché at the beginning: when Reid was a child, he stood up to a bully to help someone. Thus, we're supposed to accept that Reid is kind-hearted even though he never once acts like it.

The other characters are even more poorly drawn. Shortround, er, Kato is taken directly from Stephen Spielberg's Book of Acceptable Racism and constantly makes gadgets. . . like all Asians. He becomes Rogen’s houseboy. Edward James Olmos is in the film, that’s about all I can say for his character, as is Cameron Diaz. Rogen gave them nothing to do except smile as Rogen tears them to shreds with his red-rubber-ball sharp comedic wit.

As for the plot, well, Rogen couldn't think of much there either. It's pointless.

Confused Direction: Even worse than the pointless plot, however, this film is utterly confused about what it wants to be. It’s labeled an “action comedy,” but it starts as a very poor drama as we spend about an hour establishing Rogen’s dislike for his rotten father and seeing Rogen and Kato decide to become super heroes. This includes ten minutes of watching these two idiots test Kato’s gadgets in a 1980’s montage gone wrong.

About an hour into the film, we finally come to the first scene I don’t dislike. Hurray! This scene introduces Cameron Diaz and seems to promise that what had been an angry, tension- free, interest-free drama will now become a comedic farce. (The film should have started here.) But it’s a fake out. The rest of the film lurches from scene to scene drifting back and forth between being a second rate action film, an unfunny comedy, and a horribly dull drama about a character from Frat Boy Office Party the Revenge. The film then ends when they run out of bad guys, and we are told the father is now redeemed. Why exactly he is redeemed isn’t clear. Apparently, we are to excuse his years of lack of integrity as a newspaper owner because he was being threatened by the DA. The decades of bad fathering? Well, forget those, the film does.

As an interesting aside, the final few minutes, easily the best and most coherent part of the film, are stolen from an episode of the 1966 television series.

Horrible Villains: And that brings us to the villains. Did I give something away when I told you that the DA is the bad guy? Rogen might think so, but you’d have to be pretty slow not to see that one coming. Rogen gives us all the cliché signs, right down to the actor coming across as a jerk. It is basically impossible to see him as anything other than a villain. But he’s not THE bad guy in any event. He’s just a subplot tacked onto the movie to give the story something to do while Rogen craps on his friends.

The real bad guy is named Chudnofsky, and therein lies the joke. . . no one can pronounce his name! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Don’t you get it? Come on, that’s comic gold. No one can pronounce his name and that makes him insecure. You’re not laughing? Apparently, you outgrew that one on the school yard? Rogen didn’t.

Eventually, the Chudster gets so insecure that he changes his name to Bloodnofsky and comes up with some really long-winded thing to say before he kills people, I’d tell you what it is, but I honestly wasn’t listening. Indeed, the character and the actor (Christoph Waltz) are a waste. And for the record, like all modern cliché villains, the Chudster lets us know he’s evil by prancing around and killing henchmen because Rogen doesn't know any other way to let you know that he's evil.

Bad Everything Else: Everything else about this film stinks too. The action sequence are uninteresting and disconnected from the plot. They also reinforce how unfunny Rogen is, as he spends his time whining until Kato whips all the bad guys. Then Rogen goes around and maturely kicks them in the groin when they are down. Grow up Seth. The CGI is horribly misused too, like when we follow two beer bottle caps flying across the room, or how each fight scene freezes so Kato can scan whatever weapons the bad guys pulled as if he were the Terminator. This was misplaced and obnoxious.

Missed Opportunity: Finally, let me point out a true irony here. “The Green Hornet” came before “Batman,” but it feels like a “Batman” rip off. And in this day and age of the dark, vigilante heroes like Batman in The Dark Knight, the Green Hornet had an obvious path to take. The Green Hornet character, who pretends to be a bad guy while fighting crime, is tailor-made to repeat the Dark Knight formula. Alternatively, it could have been played as a farce or parody of the Dark Knight formula. Either would have made a memorable and entertaining film. But the one thing no one should have done is try to combine a dull son-hates-father drama with a bland action film and Hot Tub Office Party. What a waste.

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Film Friday: The Box (2009)

When it comes to films, I’m all for creativity. Interesting camera angles, unique visual tricks, and neat twists of chronology all have the potential to truly enhance a film and make it stand out. But there’s a catch. The creativity needs to serve a purpose, otherwise it’s just a gimmick, and gimmicks get annoying fast. One film that suffers from misuse of such gimmicks is The Box, a 2009 science fiction story based on Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button.”

** spoiler alert **

Matheson, by the way, is one of science fiction’s greats. His most famous works include “I Am Legend” and “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” and many of his works have ended up as films or Twilight Zone episodes. Even “Button, Button” was made into a Twilight Zone (1985 version) before it was made into The Box.

The Box is the story of a young couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, who have no chemistry) who receive a box from a mysterious man, who offers them one million dollars if they push the button on top of the box. The catch? Someone they don’t know will die when they push the button. In and of itself, this makes a fairly interesting premise for a psychological character study. Would you push the button? Does it matter that you do or don’t know the people? What happens if you and your spouse disagree? What happens if you push the button and then change your mind?

Yet pushing the button is only the beginning of the plot. Without giving too much away, it soon turns out that the box delivering man, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), works for some very powerful people, and they have the power to control the minds of people all around the unhappy couple. This turns the film into a mystery the characters try to solve who these people are, how they are controlling people, and why they are doing it. All told, this should make the plot very interesting and well worth seeing. But there are major problems with this film that kept me from enjoying it, and those problems were entirely avoidable.

First, director Richard Kelly sets the film in 1976. So what's wrong with 1976? Well, for starters, this is not the kind of film that benefits from being a period piece, unless there's a good reason for it, e.g. you're spanning time. Here the reason will not be obvious to most people and is not strong enough to justify making this a period piece (he wants the film to coincide with a Mars probe). That makes this feel like a gimmick, and it becomes annoying as you find yourself waiting to find out why the film is set in 1976. . . only to discover there's no real reason. Further, 1976 is not far enough back to be a sufficiently interesting period. Consequently, you end up feeling that the director chose 1976 just so he could play music from that period and have several scenes where the television announces some “new” sitcom that eventually would become a classic -- a total cliché for modern period pieces.

Secondly, even though this film could have taken place anywhere in the world, Kelly chose Richmond as a setting. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, except that Kelly uses the setting as a reason to have Cameron Diaz fake a “Virginia” accent, something she does very, very poorly. Again, there is no reason to have done this and it comes across as yet another gimmick.

Third, Kelly tries to build drama by stretching out his scenes. This is a trick that various great directors have mastered -- Quentin Tarantino comes to mind. But whereas Tarantino fills his scenes with compelling dialog and a steadily building level of tension, Kelly just stretches each scene. This causes the film to feel slow and meandering, even though the nature of the plot should make it fast-paced. It also comes across like a heavy-handed, film-school gimmick.

Kelly also repeatedly demonstrates a lack of faith in his audience. For example, he keeps beating you over the head with the idea that he's withholding key elements from the audience and that this is the kind of film that won’t explain everything. But at the same time, he tells you the information he is supposedly withholding if you just pay attention to what the radio and the background characters tell you. And in case you miss it the first time, they repeat themselves a dozen times. And just in case you still missed it, he repeatedly interjects scenes where two characters suddenly begin explaining to each other what is about to happen (or what just happened) and what it means.

Yet, at the same time, Kelly is too coy and waits too long to get into the plot details. Thus, you’re confronted with scenes like the opening scene, where a student humiliates Diaz seemingly for no reason. You will understand much later what possessed the student to act this way (though Diaz’s reaction makes no sense), but until that happens you’re left with a scene that just strains credibility and drags the movie down.

Continuing the lack of faith issue, Kelly doesn't trust that his audience will accept his characters' choices, so he stacks the deck. Indeed, rather than letting the young couple decide on their own whether or not to push the button, the first several minutes of the film are a set up where everything the couple has relied upon financially is slowly taken away from them. Thus, the film itself justifies their decision to push the button and thereby resolves the moral issue that theoretically sits at the center of this movie, i.e. the film excuses their behavior. Kelly then repeats this trick several times throughout the film to make the paths the couple should choose obvious in each instance. It would have been much better not to manipulate the circumstances, but to let the characters deal with their own thoughts and emotions honestly.

All in all, Kelly had in his grasp a fantastic story with incredible potential. But he kept mucking it up with pointless gimmicks that did nothing but distract from the film, and he weakened the underlying dilemmas by manipulating the circumstances to make the moral decisions much easier for his characters. If he hadn’t done these things, I would be screaming that everyone should see this film. As it is, all I can really say is that it was an interesting film that I'm glad I saw, but I don’t want to see it again, and I can’t help but think that I would have been better off just reading the short story.

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