"The Green Hornet" Movie Trailer Review

"The Green Hornet"

Movie Trailer Review

By our guest blogger, Rob Stammitti

I have to wonder if there was a single person five years ago that ever expected Seth Rogen would star in an adaptation of a serious comic book superhero.

But lo and behold, here he is as the Green Hornet, a masked vigilante who actually has been on radio and TV about as much as he has comic books.

Without the mask, Green Hornet is Britt Reid, a goofy party animal (not too much of a stretch for Rogen there) who decides to fight crime when his newspaper mogul father is murdered by gangsters. He's joined by his martial artist valet Kato (Jay Chou), and together they manage to infiltrate the various crime syndicates of the city by getting on the bad side of the cops and actually fighting crime more conspicuously.

As far as comic book movies go, "Hornet" definitely looks like upper-tier material. The balance between humor and action looks pretty solid, despite some rather obvious gags in the trailer (Rogen getting knocked out when he accidentally shoots himself with a gas gun, for example). The action is a bit more interesting--the film is directed by Michel Gondry, and as those familiar with his work ("Eternal Sunshine," "The Science of Sleep") probably know, the guy's off the wall no matter what material you give him. In one moment of the trailer, Kato kicks a baddie over the hood of a car, and though you'd expect that to look rather normal in a typical action movie, it's actually really bizarrely layered and trippy.

Really, that combination of Gondry and Rogen (who, with his "Superbad" co-writer Evan Goldberg also wrote the film) is what makes the film so intriguing. And the odd combo seems to have worked out for them. Looks like a lot of fun.

"The Green Hornet" will be released January 14, 2011. Trailer is below. Thoughts?