The Green Hornet: Bruce Lee would not be pleased

Newspaper heir Britt Reid never really cared for much in life except for partying and having a good time. But after the death of his father he decides to don a disguise and make a difference as the crime fighter The Green Hornet. Along with his trusted sidekick Kato they set out to clean up the streets of Los Angeles.

Based off of the 1960's television series of the same name The Green Hornet had something of a Batman vibe to it given the backstory of the main character (Britt Reid, like Bruce Wayne, is a rich kid who decides to take justice into his own hands after the murder of his father). However with Seth Rogen in the role of Reid, the audience was no doubt expecting quite a few hilarious one-liners  and other comic gems to complement the action expected in a superhero film. While the action was present (most of the said action was supplied by Jay Chou who played Kato), the sloppily scripted story never connected with the audience. Rogen's Reid/Green Hornet failed to be anything other than an unfunny, spolied brat who was completely unbelievable as a good guy, let alone a superhero. Christoph Waltz, as the bad guy Chudnofsky, was whinier than a seventeen year old girl who didn't get asked to prom and never amounted to anything menacing or convincingly evil while Cameron Diaz did nothing more than show up and look hot. Even the directing by Michel Gondry (who has directed visually unique films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep) seemed ordinary and added little to an already underwhelming film.

The bad jokes, shoddy story/plot, poor acting and stagnant directing all combined to make The Green Hornet nothing super at all.

Grade: D

Knight and Day: Tom Cruise as a guy who's lost his mind? There's a stretch!

Perpetually unlucky at love, June thinks her fortunes might have changed when she meets the mysterious Roy. But she might be in for more than she bargained for as it turns out Roy is a highly trained government agent that has apparently gone rogue and holds in his possession a secret device that could change the world.

For the first part of this film, you were fully engaged in what was happening on screen. It was hard to tell if Tom Cruise’s Roy was an agent who had flown the coop (mentally and physically) or if he was just a good guy who had been framed, Cameron Diaz was believable as June, the charming girl next door who was stuck in the middle of a mental exercise of being attracted to Roy but having that attraction put her in constant mortal danger. To top it off, the action was a mile a minute as the audience was inundated with a plane crash, a car chase and a number of fist and gun fights all within the first hour of screen time. Unfortunately the second half of the movie became mired in painful predictability story-wise via the use of prototypical plot devices featured in action comedies (such as True Lies), and a truly lackluster romance between the two leads. Try as they might, Cruise and Diaz had all the chemistry of oil and water, which meant the audience had nothing emotionally to connect with in Knight and Day.

All of the star power in the world could not save the movie from being nothing more than a cold, clone of an action comedy.

Grade: C-