By Chris Tookey
Last updated at 12:26 PM on 21st January 2011
Verdict: Oh, do buzz off!
Rating: 
The high point of The Green Hornet comes near the start of its grotesquely bloated two hours. A new supervillain (James Franco, in a brief, uncredited cameo) is taunting an old one for not being cool, stylish or scary enough.
This is a serious mistake, as the old villain is the splendidly creepy Christoph Waltz, an Oscar-winner for Inglourious Basterds.
This one scene has a humour and menace altogether missing from the rest of this lame, semi-spoof superhero movie. In the context of the BBC’s treatment of mature presenters such as Miriam O’Reilly it’s even topical.
Super annoying: Cameron Diaz and Seth Rogan star in this abject failure of a superhero movie
Sadly, most of the rest of the film is taken up with tiresome bickering between the crime-fighting Green Hornet (Seth Rogen), a charmless young billionaire party animal who’s inherited a newspaper empire, and his Asian chauffeur-cum-sidekick (Jay Chou).
As if they’re not annoying enough, the reliably vacuous Cameron Diaz turns up as — believe it or not — the brains of Rogen’s newspaper operation.
The bad news for anyone whose New Year resolution is to lose weight is that Rogen has shed at least two stone since Knocked Up, but it hasn’t made him any more credible as a leading actor.
He’s not helped by a self-written script that establishes his character as a charmless airhead — a male Paris Hilton — and never allows him to mature beyond self-absorbed oafishness.
Director Michel Gondry, whose gift is for quirkiness, is completely out of his depth. He has no aptitude for fights or chase sequences and allows almost every scene to go on ad nauseam. The 3D process has all too obviously been added after filming.
The one saving grace is Mr Waltz. Nicolas Cage was supposed to have played the Russian supervillain, but parted company with the production after insisting he played him with a Jamaican accent. So, amazingly, this film could have been even worse.
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