The Green Hornet
(France, 2006) 10 minutes
Fan films are truly an international phenomenon these days, but few of them prove it like Aurélien Poitrimoult’s The Green Hornet. After all, where else are you going to see a Japanese Filipino character speak English with a French accent while pretending to kick ass in an American city? It’s like a particularly violent meeting of the U.N., just without all those little, orange UNICEF boxes.
For those of us who only vaguely recall the Green Hornet–which means everyone under the age of 50–here’s the scoop: The Hornet was a masked, urban crime fighter created for a radio series in the mid-1930s. The team who invented The Lone Ranger also developed the Hornet, so he was actually the great-nephew of the famed cowboy (which if you think about it, means the Ranger wasn’t really that lonely, but I digress). When not busting up crime syndicates, the Hornet was actually Britt Reid, a newspaper publisher sick of watching evildoers run rampant in his city. In an ironic twist that even the radio show’s eight-year-old audience could grasp, the Hornet was considered a fugitive from the law.
Greenie was the subject of a few movie serials and plenty of comic books, but the character is best known for the short-lived 1960s TV series that launched Bruce Lee’s career. Lee played Kato, the Hornet’s trusty companion (think Tonto with a face-smashing roundhouse kick), and after the show croaked, he went on to become an action movie legend. The show itself is rarely seen, however, because it only lasted 26 episodes; most shows don’t go into syndication until they hit the magic 100, so the Hornet has rarely flown on TV screens since it first aired.
All of which brings us to Poitrimoult’s 10-minute take on the Green Hornet, Kato, film noir and really violent…er…violence. This flick is slicker than a politician covered in Crisco. Between the expert camerawork, professional stuntmen and paper-thin storyline, you’d almost swear you’re watching a Hollywood movie.
***SPOILER ALERT***The plot is that someone’s robbing museums and framing you-know-who, so the Hornet wants to find the real criminal, a mafia don, in order to clear his own name. The mobster must have stolen some good stuff–none of that Henry Moore garbage–‘cause the green guy and Kato are on a tear. They mow down four hoods to get to the mobster’s main flunky, then they breakout the ol’ can of whoopass on a few more hoods in order to get to the same flunky. Having defeated them, they face yet another, albeit very large, hood straight out of videogame boss central casting. Once he’s down, they finally get to the flunky, who gives up the name of the big-cheese mobster.
The moment is tense as GH and Kato enter the Godfather’s office. You’ll be giddy with anticipation–now we’re really gonna see the blood flow! It’s a French movie, so this has to be one hell of a denouement, with the crime lord going down big time. Sure enough, when the confrontation finally comes, you will be slack-jawed, because after all the punching, kicking, karate chopping and general hi-yah-ing that has led to this moment, the Green Hornet lets loose with…a really stern warning. And then he leaves.
Like I said, it’s a French movie.
But the story isn’t the point anyway; it’s the action, and in that department, The Green Hornet delivers like a pizza guy in a porn flick. The fighting–and indeed, much of the movie’s look and feel–is often comparable with the first Matrix movie. The brawls all have a crisp, incessant flow of blows, but rather than coming across solely as practiced moves, they also resonate with an urgency and creativity that keeps you watching. The film’s Green Hornet and Kato (Manu Lanzi and Patrick Vo, respectively) handled all the choreography and it’s often a sight to behold, particularly when Vo is in motion. When he flies through the air at some points, you’d swear he was hanging from wires, but a short “making of” featurette at the website incredibly proves otherwise (curiously, the movie is in English, but the “making of” is French-only).
The only serious complaint about this movie is that director Aurélien Poitrimoult has made it very dark–and not in a “Marilyn Manson and Charles Bukowski go take in a David Lynch picture”-kind of way, but rather a “I can’t see what the hell’s going on”-kind of way. Most of the movie sports a heavy green tint straight out of (there it is again) The Matrix, which hurts a number of scenes, particularly the alley fight that is the film’s centerpiece. Still, if you’re looking for a fun way to spend the last 10 minutes of your work day, you could do a lot worse than to watch Lanzi and Vo make Parisian dentists rich as they bust tooth after croissant-lovin’ tooth.
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