 The new film adaptation of “The Green Hornet’’ raises a few intriguing questions. That fondness, given fullest expression in “Be Kind Rewind” and brilliantly married with digital inventiveness in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and many music videos, struggles to find a foothold in a story with very little room for poetry. In part, because the Green Hornet was always the superhero equivalent of an independent vendor, created for radio in the 1930s and showing up in movie serials and on TV (the 1966 series costarred Bruce Lee as Kato). Well, let me employ sarcasm: Well done, Seth Rogen and Michel Gondry. WITH: Seth Rogen (Britt Reid/the Green Hornet), Jay Chou (Kato), Cameron Diaz (Lenore Case), Christoph Waltz (Chudnofsky), Edward James Olmos (Axford), David Harbour (Scanlon) and Tom Wilkinson (James Reid). “The Green Hornet’’ paints heroes and villains alike as emotionally needy little boys playing dress-up with live ammunition. You made a superhero movie for people who thought "The Dark Knight" needed to lighten up.
– A handful of critics enjoyed Seth Rogen's bumbling reinvention of Green Hornet—but only a handful. The movie's currently at 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, though to be fair, audiences liked it a fair bit more (71%). Here's what they're saying: The first half of the movie has a “genuinely subversive comic verve” painting “heroes and villains alike as emotionally needy little boys playing dress-up with live ammunition,” writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. “The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck.” Roger Ebert hated it, calling it “almost unendurable” in the Chicago Sun-Times. He blames Seth Rogen, “who co-wrote the screenplay, giving himself way too many words, and then hurls them tirelessly at us at a modified shout.” “The Green Hornet is not terrible, just pointless,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times. “It offers further proof that superheroism is, at least for now, pretty well tapped out” as a movie subject. But Dan Kois of the Washington Post loved it—and wrote his review in the voice of Batman. “This punk, the Green Hornet. His movie's fun. It's light-hearted. It's full of jokes. Jokes! My enemies tell jokes. Riddles, whatnot,” the Dark Knight complains. “Heroes don't tell jokes.”