THE GREEN HORNET (2011 - 12A)

They are everywhere. Superheroes. Absolutely everywhere It's getting to the point where, according to cinema, there are more people fighting crime with superhuman abilities than there are 'normal' people idly pottering about their every day business waiting to be saved. Studios are tripping over themselves to get another one made, released and merchandised. The trouble is, the pool of superheroes of which to pick from is beginning to quickly diminish which means that we either have to visit old ground (see Spiderman, Superman, X-men and Batman reboots) or the film makers have to dig out or come up with something original. This is beginning to result in our heroes becoming more and more obscure and less well known.

I didn't know a great deal about the history of the Green Hornet which led me to believe that it was a recent comic book invention that a studio had desperately latched onto in order to keep the superhero cash registers in action, but a quick bit of Internet research quickly proved me wrong. The Hornet, a masked vigilante fighting crime with his martial arts expert sidekick Kato both portrayed as a villains by the media, has been around since the 1930's, appeared on American radio and has been in comic books for years. There's been TV serials and all sorts of references over the years in popular culture to the character. How did it pass me by? It also appears that people have been trying to get a feature film off the ground for almost 20 years. Just looking at the film's far from gospel wikipedia page points to a very protracted and difficult history. It's been one of those will they/won't they films for ages, it's been attached to names such as George Clooney, Greg Kinnear, Jake Gyllenhaal, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Smith and a script that seems to have had a rewrite every ten minutes. It finally got made, Michel Gondry behind the camera with Seth Rogen as the Hornet and on screenplay duty with Evan Goldberg. So now that it's finally come to light, has it done it's legacy justice.



The truth it's not really a superhero film, in two senses. The Green Hornet isn't actually a superhero, he doesn't have any super powers. He's from the same stable as Batman, a vigilante with lots of cash out to clean up this town. He's just a hero. That's just a technicality though, I'm being a pedant, but now we've cleared that up, the real problem with the film is that it is a million miles away from being a super hero film, in fact it's not even a decent hero film.

The first thing that I noticed was how unoriginal it felt. The Batman comparison I made a moment ago is, I must admit, obvious, but what else am I supposed to say, it is about a bloke who loses his parent/parents which drives him to get revenge and rid the world of the crime that took his parents away. The bloke also has loads of cash because his father was loaded, which he chucks at a whole host of crime fighting toys and cool vehicles. I could be talking about either Batman or the Green Hornet. I am led to believe that the Green Hornet was born about 5 years before Batman was, so I'm not saying it's deliberately ripping off the Dark Knight, it's just that because of the popularity and widespread appeal of Batman, the story of the Green Hornet feels woefully short of fresh.

It's staleness doesn't stop there though. Rogen's script goes after laughs regularly, mostly playing the 'inept hero' card but we've seen this brand of humour already with Raimi's Spiderman films and even the X-Men films to a point. The jokes also aren't very good, they're not funny and old. Not a good combo. A buddy movie has also been attempted. The relationship between Rogen's Hornet and his sidekick Kato played by Jay Chou (a massive star in Asia winning the World Music Award four times) is again something that has been seen many times before (in every single buddy film ever made) - you know the sort of thing, two blokes meet, become friends, fall out, get back together just in time to save the day and have a happy ending. It's been done much better many times elsewhere. Another issue is it's apparent attempt at being a bit edgier, a bit more violent. There are guns and people do get shot, proper shot, with blood and getting dead. It's doesn't have the glossy idealistic atmosphere of Spiderman for example. This is all very good but it comes almost a year after Kick Ass, which is again another instance of something doing it all much much better than the Green Hornet.

So, it clearly isn't pushing any boundaries, but that isn't to say it can't still be decent can it?

Seth Rogen is a watchable presence so he does just about get away with being the lead in this film. He's understandably much more at home with the comedy elements of the role, being a useless vigilante and a selfish pig at the beginning of the film. However once he is required to show some emotion in the serious moments, or towards the end of the film where he has to pull his socks up to save the day, he struggles to convince. Chou is probably the best part of the film, getting the most laughs. There is a youthful feel to his performance, a cheeky boyish look here, a sulky grimace there. It works well and you quickly forget that his slight struggles with the grasp of the English Language affect his delivery of the script. Cameron Diaz's inclusion as the secretary and brains of the operation irritated me hugely. Not anything to do with Diaz herself necessarily but the role itself is clumsily included, clunkily written and there as obvious exposition. Consequently it looks as though Diaz is rubbish, whereas the reality is, actors can only do the best with what they are given. The biggest disappointment of the film is Christoph Waltz, someone who really knows how to play a bad guy. His turn in Inglorious Basterds was a revelation and rightly picked him up an Oscar but he also proved it again in Water For Elephants where, again he was the best thing about the film. So how is his baddie in the Green Hornet, Chudnofsky, so bad? Rogen's script makes Chudnofsky an insecure baddie, constantly worrying about what others think of him and his standing in the criminal world as youngsters try and muscle in on his empire. It is an amusing concept but it isn't transferred well to the screen. The chase for both laughs and scares causes Waltz to lose all of the menace and the madness that was present in Inglorious and Water for Elephants, and before you say he might not be trying to recapture that, he clearly is, talking to victims in that familiar way, with that charming but mental smile, before blowing them away. This film has somehow conspired to make Christoph Waltz not scary, which is some achievement.

It's not all doom and gloom though. Michel Gondry's inclusion as director does have it's benefits. Always daring and creative when it comes to putting something on screen, Gondry deals with the simple stuff well, he knows how to film comedy properly, but he makes the action in the Green Hornet a joy to watch. Kato's skill in the fist fights is shown in brilliant slow-mo with the camera spinning around the action constantly and focusing on Kato's next target, almost taking you inside his instinctive thought process. There is also a fantastic amount of destruction in the finale that Gondry clearly enjoys and handles well.

It's not enough though, A bit of exciting camera work and a few explosions, it can't rescue the film. All in all, it's a huge disappointment, it's not a good comedy, it's not a good superhero film, the acting is passable, the script is poor and becomes overly convoluted towards the end, and although it's not totally predictable, there is no peril, you always know deep down that our heroes are going to win the day. If you want to watch a  superhero film like this, just go back to some of the others I mentioned earlier, because you've practically seen the Green Hornet already.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (2011 - cert 12A)

While I was at the most recent Secret Cinema I was stood with my friends talking to one of the actors, a child who had lost her mother, and realised that I was stood outside a mock-up of an old cinema in French occupied Algeria. On it's outside wall were posters of old films, and I joked about how all old film posters were the same.  A man and a woman embracing in the foreground with all sorts of flashes of action snapped from the film going on behind them. Gone With The Wind is the perfect example.

Later as I filed out of the Secret Cinema venue and hurried to catch a train to a BBQ in Waterloo I saw a poster for Water For Elephants, which I knew I was seeing the next day, the girlfriend having put in a request after a long sequence of us going to see 'my' choices.

It's clearly a throwback to those posters, the similarities jump out immediately. In many ways it sums up the whole film. It really is an old-fashioned love story, it looks like it, it feels like it. It even starts like it. Right from the opening scene that is only just short of clunky, where an old man turns up at the circus only to do so late and miss the show. He is taken into the office by a staff member who tries to ring round to find out which retirement home he is from. They talk and it transpires that the old man used to work at the circus, not just any circus, the Benzini Brothers Circus years, years ago back in 1931. Cue laboured flashback. Yes, you're right, it's been done before, many times and it immediately reminded me of the opening of Titanic, but fortunately not nearly as irritating.  Anyway, we drift back to 1931 and the old man's voice becomes that of R-Patz, sorry Robert Pattinson, this is a serious role for the heart throb from Barnes as he tries to move away from the teen-vampire-flick market, dispelling with the nickname that the female teenage masses have given him. 

Pattinson plays Jacob, a young man who has it all, about to become a vet and embark on a successful life. It quickly goes wrong though when his parents die in a car crash. Heartbroken, he doesn't finish his training, he is thrown out of his house and wanders the railways searching for the first train he comes across to take him to a new life. That first train is the travelling Benzini Brothers Circus and he quickly snaps himself a job as the vet. The film then focuses on a love triangle involving Jacob, Reese Witherspoon's character Marlena, the star attraction of the circus with her horses act, and August, the owner of the circus played by Chrisopth Waltz (Inglorious Basterds). 

It's fair to say that I wasn't thrilled at the prospect of this film, I said yes conscious of the fact that I was always dragging the girlfriend to the next Superhero film. This hesitancy could be to blame for the fact that while I was in the cinema there were parts of the film where I was bored, it dragged more often than a film should. So much so that when I left, I was convinced I hadn't enjoyed the film at all. I rolled my eyes as we got out, and in my defence the girlfriend didn't enjoy it much either. She thought long stretches were dull as well. Then the more time that passed, the more we both found ourselves thinking about it, the more scenes appeared in my mind, the more moments we kept bringing up in conversation. The weirdest thing was that the more I thought about the scenes, the more positively I felt about them. My attitude now is completely different to that of when I left the cinema. 

I've pondered long and hard about why this phenomenon has taken place and I can only really put it down to the characters and the actors. The film is very tightly written by the experienced hand of Richard LaGravenese, who has things like the Bridges of Madison County and The Fisher King under his belt, so credit should go there where it is due, but it's the actors who really bring the characters to life. All three corners of the love triangle on show here shine, each in different ways. R-Patz, sorry, Robert Pattinson is who the film follows but is probably the least interesting character of them all. That isn't to say his time on screen is dull though. He is assured and confident and keeps the film pushing along with a performance that does suggest he might actually make the transition to 'proper' actor. His Jacob is instantly likeable and although it seems simple and obvious to state the importance of that, it's not easy to actually pull it off. Reese Witherspoon doesn't stand out in Water For Elephants, but again this is not a criticism. She has become so consistently dependable that we just expect her to be nothing short of very good. She has a gift of always being someone different in all of her roles, but not changing much about her at all. She always looks and sounds like Reese Witherspoon, but she is always someone else despite that. Waltz, once again, is the show stealer. Like in Inglorious he plays a charming nutcase, smiling his way through the film but behind that grin you know he is a complete and utter maniac. It's great to watch but it's a shame that it feels like it's been done before, all be it being a more child friendly version in this instance. 

For director Francis Lawrence it's an interesting move. Following Constantine and I Am LegandCGI, highlighted in I Am Legend, is again apparent here, the animals looking cheap, lifted straight from a B-Movie.

So, it would seem that's a positive review, which I certainly wouldn't have foreseen if you had grabbed me as I was filing out of the exit of my local multiplex. It leaves me in quite a difficult position, because I would recommend it, but in doing so I would be stating that it is acceptable to leave me bored during a film if afterwards I gradually change my mind. Yes it's slightly tedious in places and a bit overly soppy throughout, but if you can get past that accept the old-school nature of it then you may just be surprised....