2011 was an interesting year for comic book movies. In the year before Marvel's The Avengers would completely revolutionize superhero filmmaking, we had movies like X-Men: First Class, Thor, Green Lantern, and Captain America: The First Avenger. That year, we also saw a superhero film of a different kind, Michel Gondry's adaptation of The Green Hornet series, which starred Seth Rogen and Jay Chou. Despite being panned by critics (it boasts a mighty 43% on Rotten Tomatoes!), this film is definitely worth a second watch, for beneath the action and the juvenile humor lies a clever and unique deconstruction of superheroes, comic book movies, and most importantly, sidekicks.
Seth Rogen plays Britt Reid, whose life is sent tumbling into a directionless abyss when his father dies of a bee sting. Like many superheroes, he is driven to vigilantism by his father's death -- kind of. Once his father is dead, he bonds with his father's mechanic, Kato (Jay Chou) over stories of how much of a jerk his father was, and while drunk, they decide to deface his father's statue, and happen to be right next to a mugging. And lo, the Green Hornet and his nameless sidekick were born!
What makes the film so unexpectedly brilliant is how it constantly subverts the tropes of comic book adaptations. Christoph Waltz's Chudnofsky is a gang lord who desperately wants to be feared, but just isn't scary, and Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's sharp writing parodies the theatricality of supervillainy as Chudnofsky tries to come up with a scary persona. He ultimately decides "Bloodnofsky" is a fitting one. The Green Hornet and Kato always leave massively gratuitous collateral damage, which is much funnier now after films like Man of Steel and Avengers: Age of Ultron (the latter of which featured an entire country being dropped from the sky). The trope the movie spends the most time exploring, however, is the relationship between superheroes and their sidekicks, for it quickly becomes clear that the Green Hornet is incompetent and desperately needs Kato. Kato builds the weapons and fights most of the criminals, but he receives no recognition. He doesn't even make it onto the news footage and decides he must have been "too fast for the camera," a nod to Bruce Lee during the filming of the original series but also a commentary on the role of the tragically underappreciated second-banana.
The action is also ambitious; it's not executed perfectly, but Gondry applies his surrealist style to Kato's martial arts to produce an exciting time-bending battle reminiscent of a video game. The movie also gives its two cents on other topics worth exploring, such as the role of the media in crime politics (which I personally think it handles better than Batman v. Superman). The film definitely isn't perfect, though; not all of the jokes work, and the film still falls into a few unintentional cliches. As an African-American, I feel a little uncomfortable with the movie's stereotypical criminal gangs of mostly minorities, although the film does cleverly wink at Hollywood's cliched portrayals of "bad neighborhoods" by having Britt notice a pair of sneakers hanging on a powerline and remark, "I think we're in the hood, Kato."
Ultimately, I think this movie was ahead of its time. It's difficult to parody the modern superhero genre when you're still in its formative age. In 2016, Deadpool surprised audiences across the board not only by bringing the Merc with a Mouth to the big screen but also providing a meta commentary on superhero films, and by 2016, we had seen more than our fair share of them. (Not only that, but it pleased people who didn't care about either by being a raunchy, laugh-a-minute comedy.) The Green Hornet is ambitious, but sometimes misguided, and it couldn't provide the same breath of fresh air from superhero oversaturation as Deadpool later would. It's not perfect, but it's leaps and bounds above 2011's other hero in a green domino mask. At least Seth Rogen's suit wasn't animated.
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