My Daily Roti Movie Reviews - The Green Hornet (2011)

I never really got the idea of the Green Hornet until I watched the movie itself. I've always thought that it's just another superhero movie where the hero can magically throw flames or lasers out of his palms. All I knew all this while about the Green Hornet is that it was originally a tv series and the legendary Bruce Lee acted in it. In fact it was one of the very first English show that Bruce Lee acted in, it was actually his stepping stone into Hollywood.

    However, when I first found out who was to be playing the role of Kato, the driver who was played by Bruce Lee I thought to myself, "Oh God! What a screwup this would turn out to be!". It was Jay Chou. No, not Jackie Chan or Jet Li but Jay Chou. I'm not a hater of Jay. In fact I think he is wonderfully talented in the music field, being able to sing well and play many instruments faultlessly but acting is one thing he's not really being viewed as....talented. *Flashback* Initial D, Jay, a Taiwanese who speaks Hokkien tries to speak Cantonese. Now though, he's trying to speak English. I think of the producers' decision to include Jay in the cast is merely to attract Asians to watch the movie rather than believing firmly in his acting skills. Bad move. Jay was obviously the weak link in this movie, struggling to twist and turn his tongue to make proper pronounciations of English terms and some of his expressions are just plain odd. Seth Rogen did alright in the movie though.

Above: Bruce Lee as the original Kato.

    Moving on to the plot, I felt that it was weakly thought out as if they wrote the script in a matter of weeks. It was just trying to be a funny version of Batman(which is brilliant) where Kato would be Robin and the Hornet would be Batman obviously. Some parts were funny but some were just corny. There were way too many scenes repeated, fight scenes especially. It was worse when they did the stupid slow motion thing which I though was rather lame. It was also a waste of money that we decided to watch it in 3D, of course it was because there were no movies available at that time of night, but there really wasn't anything impressive about the 3D, gimmick!

    Anyway, the movie was mediocre for me, it did provide a few laughs but all in all it wouldn't be memorable. Hell, I forgot about most of the plot already. Kudos to Seth Rogen though who lost a few pounds to play the role.

My Roti Rating: 6/10 (burnt outside but soggy inside)