Critics Think Green Hornet Should Buzz Off

A handful of critics enjoyed Seth Rogen's bumbling reinvention of Green Hornet—but only a handful. The movie's currently at 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, though to be fair, audiences liked it a fair bit more (71%). Here's what they're saying:

• The first half of the movie has a “genuinely subversive comic verve” painting “heroes and villains alike as emotionally needy little boys playing dress-up with live ammunition,” writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. “The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck.”

• Roger Ebert hated it, calling it “almost unendurable” in the Chicago Sun-Times. He blames Seth Rogen, “who co-wrote the screenplay, giving himself way too many words, and then hurls them tirelessly at us at a modified shout.”
• “The Green Hornet is not terrible, just pointless,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times. “It offers further proof that superheroism is, at least for now, pretty well tapped out” as a movie subject.
• But Dan Kois of the Washington Post loved it—and wrote his review in the voice of Batman. “This punk, the Green Hornet. His movie's fun. It's light-hearted. It's full of jokes. Jokes! My enemies tell jokes. Riddles, whatnot,” the Dark Knight complains. “Heroes don't tell jokes.”

(More Green Hornet stories.)