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The Green Hornet

On the plus side, the first ten minutes went well. On the negative side…

Premise

- It was too easy for Britt Reid and Kato to become crime fighters. At the story’s opening, Kato had already developed much of the technology and was already a martial arts expert. Shifting all that to battling crime was minor when heroes need a more dramatic push into action.

- Kato was a genius engineer and a martial arts expert and had a super skill of being able to sense things in slower time. 1) That was two things too many for a What if? story. I’ll say it again- a What if? can only add one make believe or fantastic element into the world as we know it. Blake Snyder calls this Double Mumbo Jumbo.

Look at Bruce Wayne in the new Batman movies- he was a martial arts expert, but not a genius engineer. He had ideas for gadgets, but Fox and others developed them. Look at Tony Stark/Iron Man- he was a genius, but not an expert fighter. The suit did the fighting.

2) The last thing about Kato was confusing and beyond the realm of believability, namely because of his other talents.

- The partnership was flimsy. Kato was the real talent and yet he hardly had to be pushed into this new way of life. Seth Rogen as Britt Reid aka The Green Hornet was the main character, yet only his money was needed for Kato to do his thing.

- Seth Rogen should have been the only comedic element in the story. His silly character bumping against the seriousness of everyone and everything else would have been natural and funny. But Chudnofsky, the DA and others acting tongue-in-cheek at times was too much and muddled the story. This was a similar issue in Pineapple Express.

Character

- Seth Rogen partying in the setup was cute and a good way of establashing his character. Rogen forgetting the girl’s name he was in bed with made him a jerk.

- On their first night out, GH and Kato tried to run a police officer off the road. That’s right- the heroes fought a cop! That was so stupid! The filmmakers felt a chase was in order, but they overlooked the much more important factors of character empathy and logic. The guys should have simply evaded the cop, not almost killed him.

- Britt Reid caused the bad guy to kill seven innocent people who happened to be wearing green. Again, the so-called hero got seven people killed. That cannot happen in such a movie.

- In the first few minutes of the movie, the bad guy Chudnofsky was told to come up with a new presence for himself, a theme and way to scare people. This was repeated throughout the movie, yet he only acted on it near the end! And what did he do for this much hyped transformation into a super villain? He put on a red leather coat and changed his name to Bloodnofsky. Ooooh.

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