CINEMA: The Boys Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

DAVID EDELSTEIN: The Green Hornet at least is likable, a refreshing change from all those heavy, angst-ridden superhero movies. The director is Michel Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a virtuoso at making childish fantasies take wing. And I’m not the first to notice a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road-movie vibe between the two stars, Seth Rogen (as Britt Reid, aka The Green Hornet) and Jay Chou (the kung fu master Kato), who are both smitten with Cameron Diaz in the Dorothy Lamour role. Rogen’s Britt is a ne’er-do-well rich kid, the son of a disapproving media mogul played by Tom Wilkinson, who dies suddenly. It’s all quite Oedipal: In a prologue, the father tears the head off his son’s superhero doll; the Green Hornet persona is born when Britt and Kato, who was his dad’s assistant, blowtorch the head off a statue of Britt’s father. Their superhero gimmick is that they’ll pretend to be bad guys but really fight criminals. And Britt wants them to be best buds. The Hope-Crosby thing might work better if the quips were fresh and Chou was more comfortable with English. He speaks as if he learned it phonetically, and unlike Bruce Lee’s Kato in the old TV show, he talks a lot. Both for PC reasons and because Chou is a big star in the all-important Asian market, Kato refuses to be Britt’s sidekick. So he and Rogen trade lame insults while fighting off bad guys. MORE