The Green Hornet

It was a bad move for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to reveal that they co-wrote Superbad at the age of 14, because it makes them look like retrograde hacks for delivering a witless stinker like The Green Hornet as grown men. Rogen also stars in this freewheeling adaptation of the radio serial and TV program about Britt Reid, a newspaper publisher turned masked vigilante. In this twitchy 3-D take, Reid is the publisher’s pampered son, but he assumes the identity of the Green Hornet to bring down a crime kingpin (Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, reduced by Hollywood to a stock teeth gnasher with depressing efficiency). You know you’re in incapable hands when a film goes through five separate mood swings in the first few scenes, yet The Green Hornet was directed by the extremely talented Michel Gondry, who was perhaps motivated by a different shade of green.