Because Seth Rogen is one of the most bankable comedy actors working in Hollywood, he barely has any noticeable bombs in his filmography. But in 2011, The Green Hornet, which he not only starred in but also co-wrote, was widely negatively received by critics. It barely made back its production and marketing budgets at the worldwide box office.
The film was criticized for being a boring action comedy with a miscast lead actor. But as the movie turned 10 years old this year, The Green Hornet hasn't aged as badly as expected, and if anything, time has served the film well and there are ways it's actually underrated.
There were so many iconic movie cars in the 2010s, whether it's the Batmobile or John Wick's 1969 Ford Mustang. However, one that goes overlooked is the Green Hornet's Black Beauty.
In the 2011 movie, the iconic Chrysler Imperial is classically black with tinted windows, but it has been tricked out more than ever. The vehicle has two machine guns mounted to the hood, a flame thrower hidden inside the grill, and it even has missiles loaded in the bumper. The car is the star of the show for half of the movie.
Kato, and especially Britt, aren't superheroes in the traditional sense. They don't have any superpowers, and Britt is more on Bruce Wayne's wave-length in that he simply has billions of dollars at his disposal. However, some scenes hint at Kato having a sixth sense, almost like Spidey-sense.
The Kato-sense gives him the ability to quickly pinpoint every weapon in the vicinity, which creates a path for him to take down every enemy in the quickest way possible. They make for some of the most fluid action sequences in the whole movie.
Marvel Studios has made it a common occurrence to cast comedians in MCU movies, such as Tim Heidecker as a tour guide in Ant-Man and the Wasp and J.B. Smoove as a teacher in Spider-Man: Far From Home. But the studio took it even further by casting comedy actors as superheroes.
However, The Green Hornet paved the way for Paul Rudd's comedic take as Ant-Man and Chris Pratt's goofy portrayal of Star-Lord. Seth Rogen plays the titular character, and he's his typical self. In that respect, given how critics have become more open to superhero movies, it might be time for the reception of The Green Hornet to be revised, as the humor isn't too different from those Marvel movies.
The Green Hornet is full of humor, and every scene features Britt and Kato's brilliant back-and-forth banter and has at least one memorable one-liner. But there's one scene that is laugh-out-loud hysterical more than any other.
After Britt and Kato have taken down a group of gangsters, both with the Black Beauty and in hand-to-hand combat, Britt starts lifting enemies up, screaming "who do you work for?!" in an intentionally cliched way. The thing is, every enemy is either knocked out or dead. It's the scene that best shows off Rogen's comic writing skills.
In the movie, Kato is played by Jay Chou, who is mostly an unknown in Hollywood, but in the TV series, the character was played by none other than Bruce Lee. Unsurprisingly, there are several references to the martial arts master, but just like him, they're blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments.
At one point, Kato says he is "too fast for the camera" when a news channel shows footage of the Green Hornet. For the show, Lee's scenes were shot at a faster rate for exactly that reason. And later in the movie, when fighting with Chudnofsky, Kato does Lee's famous "one-inch punch" on one of them.
Throughout the movie, in all of the fight scenes, multiple people end up fatally wounded, and it doesn't shy away from that fact either. There might not be any blood in the movie, but villains are getting slaughtered by the Black Beauty's machine guns and Chudnofsky is shooting people at point-blank range.
Not only that, but the screenplay was written by Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg. That means that the movie is unsurprisingly filled with more crude jokes than audiences would generally see or hear in a child-friendly superhero movie.
It's refreshing to see that Kato, who is essentially the Green Hornet's sidekick, is way more powerful than the Hornet. In fact, if it wasn't for Kato, Britt would have ended up dead after five minutes.
Because Kato has more abilities than Britt, whether it's the Kato-sense or being a mechanical genius, their bond is stronger than any other superhero movie duo. On top of that, there's a fascinating power struggle between the two of them too. No other film has tackled this concept before, except for Batman & Robin, but everyone knows how that turned out.
For being a schlocky superhero movie, The Green Hornet actually had a cinema auteur behind the camera. Michel Gondry is best known for directing the essential break-up movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. What was so great about the movie is that, as it's filled with one dream sequence after another, there's so much inventive filmmaking when it comes to the technical aspects.
That's no different with The Green Hornet, as the movie is full of ingenious practical effects that no other director could think up. Between the sequence of Kato building all of the tech and the 10-scene split-screen scene, it makes people wonder what Gondry could be capable of behind the wheel of a Marvel movie.
The Green Hornet is considered to be one of Seth Rogen's worst movies, but it's one of the few where he doesn't play a man-child stoner. Well, he doesn't play a stoner, at least.
Britt Reid is a man-child, as he makes out with women in his father's sports cars and needs to be woken up with a coffee made by a servant he doesn't even know. However, there are many characteristics to Britt that are new for Rogen, and he doesn't completely play the typical Rogen-like stoner that he's known for.
Quentin Tarantino discovered Christoph Waltz, and the actor's big break was when the director cast him as Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. The "Jew Hunter" became one of the most iconic villains ever, and it paved the way for Waltz to play more memorable antagonists.
Along with being a bad guy in Horrible Bosses 2 and taking over as Blofeld in the James Bond series, Waltz played Chudnofsky, a paranoid Russian gangster in The Green Hornet. On the face of it, it's easy to see Chudnofsky as derivative of Landa, but there's so much more to the Russian than meets the eye. What makes the character so great, besides the fact that he's just as menacing as any of Waltz's roles, is that he's going through a midlife crisis. There's not much funnier than a bad guy worrying about what suit he's wearing while killing people.
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