'Green Hornet' review: Get the flyswatter

It would be too much to expect inspiration in "The Green Hornet." There's nothing here but a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy, at the center of which somebody - oh, no - had to come up with an actual movie. No one loved it into existence. No one had a dream. Yet even under these canned conditions sometimes people come up with a way to do it, some invigorating new idea. That didn't happen this time.

The script, based on the old-time radio show, was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who wrote the very inspired "Superbad." But throughout this movie, one gets the sense of clever writers trying to trick the devil while inside the devil's pocket, by mocking the hackneyed material even as they're adapting it in earnest. But you can't sell out your integrity while simultaneously maintaining it, and so the resulting movie is a mess, conceptually weak, with no rooting interest, and yet with pockets of amusing-enough dialogue.

In a similar way, Michel Gondry, who made "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" surely must know - if we know, he has to - that "The Green Hornet" is the proverbial sow's ear. He can't do anything with it, except he can make it look as good as possible, and so we get carefully crafted and rather imaginative visuals that show, for example, how Kato's mind slows down time in moments of crisis. But that's not the same as a story, with vivid characters who have needs and obstacles to overcome. In place of the basic elements of storytelling, the movie offers vacancy.

Indeed, it feels less like an adaptation of "The Green Hornet" than a series of vague gestures on a "Green Hornet" theme. Rogen plays Britt, a spoiled young playboy who inherits a newspaper and media empire when his father (Tom Wilkinson) dies unexpectedly. He goes out on a drunken tear with Kato (Jay Chou), his father's former mechanic, and they end up rescuing a young couple from a marauding street gang. This is when Britt gets the idea to become a superhero with a twist - to do good deeds while cultivating the public image of a villain, an image he promotes in his own newspaper.

The real villain, meanwhile, is an Eastern European mobster who runs all the city's illegal activities. He's played by Christoph Waltz ("Inglourious Basterds"), who is introduced in the movie's one genuinely satisfying scene. Waltz shows up at a nightclub to talk to the owner, who has been creating a thriving crystal meth business without giving the mobster his share. Now he asks politely for his tribute, upon which the young drug mogul - played by James Franco in a fun uncredited cameo - laughs and tells him that he's old, that he isn't scary, that he dresses poorly, and that he's washed up ...

Star image is a wonderful thing. Most of us know Waltz from only one movie. But just from that single exposure, even as we see him sinking into his chair and looking smaller and more unsure by the second, we know there's only one way this scene is going to end. Nothing in the rest of "The Green Hornet" comes near that.

The film's insurmountable problem is that Rogen and Goldberg are committed to the comic notion that Britt is an idiot. This becomes a box that the character and the movie can't escape. At no point does Britt's strategy of doing good while pretending to be evil ever reveal itself to be coherent. On the contrary, Rogen's Green Hornet doesn't do anybody any good, not even by accident - he just wreaks havoc. Britt is a joke, a parody of a fatuous rich heir. That provides the occasional laugh, as when Britt comes on to his secretary (the long-suffering Cameron Diaz), who loathes him. But when the violence comes, who cares if this fatuous, ineffectual, trouble-making idiot survives?

It's strange, but even in an action comedy, if the audience doesn't care whether the protagonist gets killed, it's a big problem. Without that one human element, all the carefully orchestrated action becomes mere commotion - and sleep-inducing.

-- Advisory: Action violence.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle