The Green Hornet

Director: Michel Gondry (2011)

Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz
Find it: IMDB

Not the unmitigated disaster that its troubled production history would have one imagine, The Green Hornet is like Pineapple Express filtered through Kick-Ass and Rush Hour. It stars Seth Rogen as Britt Reid, a rich playboy who, in a bid to make something of his life, becomes vigilante. Enter The Green Hornet. It's a good job that he has Kato (Chou) on his side, since Rogen is more useless here than he's ever been. He tones down the Rogenisms somewhat, but is still essentially playing, well, Seth Rogen. Reid thinks that he's the big cheese, but really it's Kato doing all of the hard work. The Green Hornet is a buddy comedy in which one of the buddies actually despises the other and the hero is really, really useless.

Despite Rogen and Chou's affability and charisma (Chou is stilted, but it works), the movie is essentially owned by Christoph Waltz's bad guy, Chudnofsky. It's a loony role literally written for Nicolas Cage, but Waltz fills it with his inimitable sense of palpable menace and actorly gravitas. Neurotic and suffering a midlife crisis, Chudnofsky isn't the dime-a-dozen gangster villain he easily could have been and is as fun to watch as Jack Nicholson's Joker.

A fun cameo at the start of the movie sets up Chudnofsky and the rest of things to come. Chubby Edward Furlong pops up for about five minutes. A "gay fart gun" gets a few good laughs, the phrase "disco Santa Claus" gets a good airing, and there's the funniest fight scene since Pineapple Express.

But. It's a bloated movie. Gondry's direction lacks its usual flare. Cameron Diaz's presence is inexplicable, since she does nothing. She's like Iron Man's Pepper Potts, only shorn of Gwyneth Paltrow's odd likeability in the role. She compares unfavourably to Gwyneth Paltrow, which says it all really. It takes too long to finish, with one Lord Of The Rings wrap-up after the other. Some of the jokes fall flat and there's an overreliance on Kato's 'Katovision'. And let's not even mention the 3D, which isn't.

There are faults, then. But then, I can't bring myself to not enjoy The Green Hornet, flabby and shabby as it occasionally might be.

Dante's Inferno

Director: Vincent Cook, Mike Disa, et al (2010)

Starring: Graham McTavish, Vanessa Branch, Steve Blum, Mark Hamill

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

At last stepping out from the shadow of God Of War and doing something of its own initiative (although Dead Space did it first), Dante stars in his first full-length animated feature. Dante's Inferno adapts the videogame and (very liberally) bits of the poem to chronicle Dante's journeys through the Circles Of Hell. Although he dies considerably less than when he did controlled by my thumbs and doesn't have to look at walkthrough guides to work out the puzzles.

If you've played Dante's Inferno, then watching the movie feels somewhat odd. Where the Dead Space thing served as a prequel to Isaac's adventures, Dante's Inferno merely tells a story we've already seen. Firsthand. You'll watch as Dante returns home from the crusades to find the love of his life dead. You'll see him descend to Hell and do battle with all manner of demons, parasites and horrible things. As he battled Minos, I kept expecting button prompts to flash up as Real Time Events. Although I don't remember running away from all of those unbaptised babies. The funnest thing about the videogame was absolving Hell's atheists and evildoers and punishing the wrongly imprisoned. Yes, even videogame me is a bastard.

As Dante jumps from Circle to Circle (in a manner of speaking. This isn't a platformer) the animation switches to a new director. It works well, keeping the movie from becoming too stale and ensuring that there's a style to suit most tastes. I wasn't a fan of the slender, feminine looking Dante but another, gruffer looking chap was soon along to fill the gap. It doesn't jar as much as one might think it does and quite suits the story's style. Kudos, by the by, to the IMDB for listing Virgil Alghieri as chief writer.

Like the videogame itself, Dante's Inferno will win no prizes for originality. It follows the plot of the game pretty stringently (save for a few nice surprises and a cameo from Hitler) and never really feels like a stand-alone feature in its own right. It's perfectly accessible to non-gamers, but fans of classic literature will be sorely disappointed.