The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011)

For once I am left without much to say about a movie, not because I didn't like it (I liked it a lot), but because other people have already said it better than I could. Both Armond White's review and a nice piece by Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope addressed all the positives I'd thought of while watching the movie and then some. White even mentioned the great Sugar Water reference Gondry pulls 2/3rds of the way through the movie.

What I guess I can add is that, despite lampooning the superhero film genre and recontextualizing Seth Rogen's usual extended adolescence motif to fit our own recent cultural obsession with superhero movies, it actually manages to have much better action than just about any of the movies it's parodying. It moves with an unforced grace that is exactly what drew me to martial arts movies to begin with -- the idea of cinematic fisticuffs being an extension of (and, somewhat sadly, mostly a replacement for) dancing in movies. It seems we would rather see people hit each other than love each other and, while I find that a little problematic, I would at least like the hitting to be as close as possible to being as delirious and beautiful as the dancing was. The Green Hornet mostly pulls it off, working in semi-long takes that revel in the movement of characters from place to place, rather than a simple, choppily rendered series of action and reaction shots. I have heard the 3D ruins much of the grace of these sequences, so I was fortunate to have waited to see it until I could watch it the normal way.

But, of course, there is all the other stuff that makes it great. The use of superhero fantasy as a way to expose upper-class white entitlement, the willingness not to be afraid to confront the problematic racial ideologies of both the previous series and with the American adventure genre in general, as well as confronting some of the sexist ideas inherent in that same genre. Not to mention pretty cleverly lampooning narcissistic image-obsession (James Franco's cameo at the beginning was what made me realize I was in for something special). It's everything Kick-Ass should've been, but was too busy trying to look cool to do. The only thing keeping it from being even better is that, even though Gondry does a good job reigning him in, the Seth Rogen Riff Machine does get a little tiring after a while.

Adam Nayman review
Armond White