MOVIE REVIEWS: THE GREEN HORNET

Box office forecasters are predicting big things for The Green Hornet this weekend. But critics are swatting it from every direction. “Overblown, interminable and unfunny,” is the way Lou Lumenick describes it in the New York Post. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal begins his review this way: “The Green Hornet may not be the end of movies as we know them, though the people who made this atrocity were certainly in there trying.” Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times calls it “an almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about. … A half-cooked mess.” Well, it is about something, according to Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s all about “a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy.” To Chris Vognar in the Dallas Morning News, it’s “a tone-deaf dud.” And Peter Howell in the Toronto Star probably uses the most wincing adjective of all when he calls The Green Hornet “stingless.” But the movie does have a few defenders among the major newspaper critics — well, at least one. Comments Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News: “Out of the barren landscape of January comes a movie that’s actually worth our while.”