Food Poisoning: SAUSAGE PARTY

The sheer number of CG animated movies about anthropomorphized animals and objects, from Pixar on down to their lowliest imitators, leaves an opening ripe for parody. Enter Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (co-writers on the likes of Pineapple Express and This is the End) with the idea to go hard-R on the Pixar formula. In Sausage Party they imagine the world of a grocery store from a food’s-eye view. The cartoon products sing an Alan Menken song about how much they wish to get purchased and live forever with their gods (us) in the Great Beyond. Little do they know certain death and digestion await. It’s a funny idea, and mostly follows through to its logical conclusions. But in pitching the humor they go too high and too low, reveling in an allegorical approach that’s a cockeyed consideration of religion and mortality, and in a nonstop barrage of four-letter words and innuendoes. The manic pace hammers away nuance with glee, and the execution grows thin, repetitive, and one-note awfully quickly.

It starts with the idea that the store is split up into its own little countries, each aisle organized around racial and cultural stereotypes of their respective cuisines. The only thing that brings them all together is worship of the shoppers. But when a hot dog (Seth Rogen) gets a hint about the truth of what sits beyond the sliding doors, he’s desperate to get proof and bring a nihilistic, hedonistic brand of atheism back to his brethren. He and his hot dog bun lover (Kristen Wiig) get lost in a tragic shopping cart accident shot like the opening of Saving Private Ryan, with a ripped open ramen cup trying to stuff his noodles back in, a jar of peanut butter weeping over spilled jam, and a banana with its face slowly peeling off. That’s a fun bit of inspiration, but the movie grows repetitively insulting as it winds its way through nonstop ethnic jokes. The hot dog and his bun-to-be, who are waiting until after purchase to get together (there’s no buns- or sausage-related innuendo that goes unspoken), wander through the store looking to get back to their aisle. Each stop on the way brings them into contact with an endlessly condescending parade of stereotypes and racial humor.

The Mexican foods (including a lesbian taco voiced by Salma Hayek) drink all day and follow secret tunnels to better lives. The Chinese foods speak in exaggerated rolling Ls and Rs. The German food wants to eliminate all the juice. The Middle Eastern lavash (David Krumholtz) feuds with a bagel (Edward Norton doing a Woody Allen impression) he thinks is unfairly settling in his aisle. The fruits are lilting lispers. The grits (Craig Robinson) is a blaxploitation gangster. The firewater (Bill Hader) is a Native American whose every appearance is signaled with an eagle’s cry. It’s a pileup of the worst kinds of tiring wink-wink racism and prejudice in pursuit of anti-racism and cross-demographic understanding. It’s so wearing, asked to laugh again and again at this sort of thing as the movie demands to feel like it’s okay because it reaches the right conclusions. Rogen and Goldberg (writing with The Night Before’s Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir) want to make a filthy adult comedy that parodies the style of the CG kids’ movie while still having a clear moral message. In other words, it’s an adults-only kids’ movie, and every bit as juvenile, wrongheaded, and infantilizing as that sounds.

The movie remains on a fairly obvious level, relying on the shock value of hearing cartoon characters swear, get violent, and express sexual urges. (Anyone who thinks that’s a new idea should talk to Ralph Bakshi.) The thing is, the writers have imagined a funny world and have an interesting perspective. They have plenty of smile-worthy puns that go down easy. Why insist on such a barrage of cynical cheap shots? Other distasteful ingredients include swipes at the disabled (consider the plight of a deformed sausage (Michael Cera) whose only soul mate can be a smushed bun) and a scene in which a feminine hygiene product (Nick Kroll) sexually assaults a juice box. (You read that correctly. That happens.) Sausage Party crosses the line, not because it wants to make an R-rated animated movie, but because it allows itself license to push further than it should with such touchy material. That it’s sometimes funny, and tethered to a surreal premise, doesn’t alleviate its uglier impulses.

Directing this perverse sledgehammer to propriety are veterans of CG family films Conrad Vernon (of a variety of DreamWorks features like Madagascar 3) and Greg Tiernan (of Thomas the Tank Engine products). They clearly relish cooking up the movie’s crass and disgusting surprises, but it’s also clearly done on the cheap. The character designs are all slightly off, not just the ugly food, but the stiff and wobbly humans lumbering over them as well. The sets and locations appear Saturday-morning simple and crude. It’s just not quite right every step of the way, in every way. It has a fine setup and some truly jaw-dropping final moments staggeringly inappropriate and in many ways inexplicable, but at least relatively non-toxic – a massive pansexual free-for-all followed by a surprising smashing of the fourth wall – compared to what comes before. But by that point the movie’s been such an obvious, overdetermined, obnoxious slog, it’s hard to cook up much interest.

Block Party: NEIGHBORS 2: SORORITY RISING

Like so many comedy sequels, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is little more than a belabored reason to repeat the first movie’s basic structure and gags, with a lower joke success rate and a sparser humor density. At least in this case the “little more” is interesting. So it’s not nothing, but still quite a bit less enjoyable than the broad, bawdy, and surprisingly thoughtful sight-gag heavy original. It found a frat house (led by Zac Efron) moving in next door to a married couple (Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen) and their baby. This was, of course, an acrimonious situation, generational discomfort agitated into a prank war as the parents sad to see their youth slipping away desperately attempted to get the frat bros evicted. By the end they’d reach some understanding, the bros and the adults going to their separate ways supposedly wiser for the experience. Not so, it turns out, as a sorority moves into the now-empty frat and the cycle starts all over again.

Getting a sorority involved is the movie’s cleverest idea. It allows for an exploration of gendered double standards, explicitly asking if the wild behavior and mean-spirited pranks the girls get up to over the course of the story would be considered quite so extreme if it were done by guys. It’s also a sharp elbow in the side of campus culture, bringing up the totally true rule that sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties. This is why a group of misfit freshmen girls (Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, and Beanie Feldstein, funny, if somehow underused in their own movie) decide to start up their own off-campus sorority, throwing a bunch of parties with cover charges to pay for rent. It’s empowering after a fashion, a sloppy animal house for the young ladies. Girls can have a dumb raunchy college comedy, too, you know. But, alas, that’s where the movie’s inspiration ends.

That freshness is tied to a retread of its returning characters’ emotional arcs. Why not find something new for Rogen and Byrne to do instead of simply worry about the effect of the out-of-control college kids next door again? Wouldn’t it be funny if they tried a different approach? The stakes are ratcheted up from the last time. Now they’ve bought a new house, are close to closing a deal selling their current one, and are afraid the girls will sink the escrow, leaving them with no choice but to go bankrupt. That’s ominous. But their response is to engage in the exact sort of behavior that got them in over their heads last time. Once more they’re torn about their out-of-touch status and fretting about being good parents while roping in old friends (like Ike Barinholtz) to terrorize the sorority and kicking off another prank war. You’d think they’d know better by now. The new idea they try is a contortion to get Efron back in the mix, this time working with them to help combat the youngsters. This is also the point where you realize age is coming for us all, and recent teen star Efron is closer in age to Rogen than to Moretz. Time marches on and whatnot.

The screenplay cobbled together by director Nicholas Stoller, Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg, with co-writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien takes narrative shortcuts to get to jokes and setpieces. Then, once there, it’s not really worth the time. There’s a lengthy sequence set at a tailgate that’s just misjudged and tedious. The parties aren’t as fun or chaotic as the first film’s; nor are the relationships between the sorority sisters sketched out as clearly as the frat bros’. That’s not to say there aren’t funny developments – a handful of Minions-inspired cutaway jokes are almost reason enough to have made the movie – but the lengths to which it goes to generate less of an effect than before is a little dispiriting. So much falls flat and so little seems to be telling a focused story or expressing coherent behavior that it’s just sitting there on screen.

Yet as far as disappointing and unnecessary sequels go, this one’s not actively harmful, just a bit of a drag. The performers have a lot of energy – more than the plot, jokes, and filmmaking know what to do with – and the whole thing has a nice low-key progressive bent. It’s not straining to be open-minded. It just is. There’s a sharp, if occasionally muddled, understanding of what it means to be a woman on a college campus and the sexist lenses with which society at large views them. (Blame the few cheaper moments – like weeping en masse to a sad movie – on the total lack of women in the writer’s room, I suppose.) And there’s something to its casual, natural acceptance. An early scene finds a gay couple’s engagement joyously celebrated by their former frat bros who jump up and down chanting “U.S.A.” That’s a patriotic image in my book. Would that all these good intentions turn the lackluster film around them into something worth the watch.

Three Wise Guys: THE NIGHT BEFORE

An R-rated Christmas comedy, The Night Before is a festive After Hours party through New York City with a trio of buddies on their last carousing Christmas Eve. They started the holiday party tradition as teenagers when Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was unexpectedly orphaned and alone. His best friends wanted to give him some Yuletide cheer and help him mourn. But now, years later, they’re moving on without him. Isaac (Seth Rogen) is married with a kid on the way, and Chris (Anthony Mackie) is a big football star. Ethan’s still adrift, without steady employment and freshly broken up from his most recent, and most perfect, girlfriend (Lizzy Caplan). He has commitment issues to everything but his Christmas traditions, and is clinging to this one last great time.

He wants it to be a perfect night of drinking, karaoke, Chinese food, and fellowship. He even scored tickets to a legendary secret party, the best in town. Naturally, his clinging to an ideal night is part of what makes it all go wrong in a cavalcade of hilarious antics involving drugs, slapstick, misunderstandings, and the fumbling loose patter of modern comic dialogue. What follows is a terrific comedy, quick and charming even when it’s just dawdling around with its leads. The throughline is the amiable chummy spirit, a hangout vibe that lets each guy’s personality breathe and bounce off the others in amusing fashion, as the night gets progressively odder. They have great sociable chemistry, convincingly close, like longtime friends who know how to twist the knife of an observation, but care enough to look out for each other’s mistakes.

They’re growing apart and recognize that, but are willing to try to keep their relationships strong. As a result, they’re often great company as they try their best to have a good time. It’s funny enough and fast enough to make me forgive it for being yet another crude comedy about man-children who need to be indulged before finding a family and settling down makes them finally grow up. Director Jonathan Levine (50/50), who co-wrote with Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg (Superbad), keeps the focus on the three guys and their problems. Because it’s rooted in real and understandable pain, and the movie’s narrative arc and comic engines are built on the unproductiveness of their partying lifestyle, it avoids certain bro-centric traps. The women's roles are underwritten, but there are none of the cheap shots found in other movies of this ilk. This is a basically kind movie, plenty of dirty banter but basically nothing in the way of cruelty.

It helps that they’re real characters, not punchline machines. One is struggling with adulthood, while his slightly more mature friends are worried about fame and babies and what their lives mean. A convincing grounding in real insecurities drives the emotions behind the silliness, a charming tension between the high emotional pressure of the holidays and the desire to cut loose and forget their troubles. Mackie’s jock is desperate to stay cool in the eyes of his fans, teammates, and sponsors. Rogen’s wife (Jillian Bell) gives him a box of drugs – a free pass to get high one last time before their baby arrives, a scary milestone he’s a total mess over. And Gordon-Levitt flashes his boyish charm, but you can see the fear of his economic and emotional instability bubbling underneath.

So they each have their problems to work out as around each corner they encounter drunken Santas, an excited limo driver, an oddball drug dealer, a homeless Grinch, surprise sexts, and other assorted comic scenarios (each involving a recognizable actor, each more unexpected than the last). It’s episodic, and therefore a little hit and miss, but I found the ratio to be fairly high as situations escalate to big laughs on a consistent basis. A highpoint is Rogen, sweaty, panicked, progressively higher, and almost-but-not-quite freaking out throughout in one of his very best performances, whether talking to a nativity scene, admiring another man’s equipment, or vomiting during a midnight mass. Levine balances the picture, though, letting each lead, and most of the supporting cast, have great little moments of surprise, humor, and warmth. Mackie gives chase to a groupie who stole his pot. Gordon-Levitt gets relationship advice from a drunk pop star. At one point, the guys stop to play Nintendo 64, for old time’s sake. They just want to have fun while they can.

A winning movie that had me smiling from beginning (with rhyming storybook narration) to end (with declarations of love), it’s filled with as much holiday spirit as raunch. Unlike a Hangover picture’s smutty cynicism, The Night Before breathes with genuine humane feeling behind its sweet and filthy jokes. It is, after all, a Christmas movie, filled with cozy messages of love, hope, self-improvement, togetherness, and the power of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball.” Likable people learn valuable life lessons after an eruption of wackiness, deciding to stop clinging to a tradition’s specifics. Instead, they grow to appreciate embracing evolving relationships while maintaining the spirit of traditions. It’s a simple message that you could fit inside a Hallmark card, but good luck finding one that comes with glitter and tinsel, but also joints, booze, Run-DMC, bad sweaters, a car crash, and a fight or three. It’s a crackling one-crazy-night Christmas comedy more than earning its right to bust guts and warm cockles on a yearly rotation.

The Bad News Bros: THE INTERVIEW

For all the hullabaloo surrounding its release, from the hackers to the threats to the studio waffling and beyond, the new Seth Rogen/James Franco comedy The Interview has only minor pleasures to offer. With its high concept, dirty jokes, sporadic violence, casual insensitivity, and queasy morality, it’s the kind of movie that, were it made in the 1970s, would be a staple of exploitation pictures recommended by Tarantino. There’s a spirited absurdity to the whole endeavor that finds Franco and Rogen as a talk show host and his producer who land an interview with Kim Jong-un, ruler of North Korea, and are promptly asked by the CIA to help them carry out an assassination. It’s one part fish-out-of-water buddy comedy, one part spy spoof, and one part bloody satire. The whole thing’s deeply silly and omnidirectionally offensive.

Franco’s talk show is positioned as a vapid gossip peddler. He’s a force of personality who gets confessional interviews out of celebrities, a sort of super dumb Dick Cavett. He’s a total idiot, a self-absorbed nonsense man so totally lost in his own media stardom he’s convinced every thought he has is worth sharing. His producer, on the other hand, has aspirations of doing more important work. He’s the one who figures out how to land this monumental interview. Though, to be fair, he’s smarter than his boss, he’s only marginally less bumbling in practice. A CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan, excellent as always) gives them a scant briefing, some secret poison, and lets them on their way to meet with a dictator and take him down. It’s a dubious plan, but, despite utilizing a real country’s actual ruler as a character and target, this isn’t a movie big on sense.

Most of the movie plays out in Kim’s vast grey compound as the two guys stumble their way around, trying not to mess up the mission and utterly failing most of the time. There are real jabs at North Korean ills – famine, executions, propaganda, isolation – mixed into scenes of technical malfunctions, missed connections, and endless coarse banter between the leads. Rogen’s the straight man, while Franco delivers a weirdly artificial performance in which every gesture, every line is letting us know he’s in on the joke. It rarely works. Funniest, even lovable at times, is Kim himself, played with charisma and sly charm by Randall Park as an insecure guy who just wants his guests to like him.

Best is the relationship they develop, as the talk show host finally meets a man as egocentric and needy as he is. There’s something biting in there about an American celebrity, especially one in something like the news business, finding much in common with a dictator. But the film’s largely sloppy as satire, blending sharp commentary and free-range goofiness. There’s also a heaping helping of the typical R-rated bro comedy’s crutches of so-called ironic sexism, racism, and gay panic, masked with a thin veil of knowing wink-wink ain’t-this-awful posturing. It’s part of the film’s broad jumble of potent nihilistic cynicism and gross out gags.

The film was helmed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, writing partners whose directorial debut was last year’s funny-at-times, and even sloppier, This is the End. Here they wrangle their story, scripted by Dan Sterling, into a mix of bro hangout, male anxieties, and satiric jabs, until culminating in an absurdly violent third-act shootout. It’s a big, hard-edged, live action cartoon, at its best when it steers straight into the absurdity. I especially liked a recurring Katy Perry song used to undercut, and later amplify, tension, the right kind of dopily weird. Otherwise, it’s a mixture of easy geopolitical points, mild media teasing, and sex, drugs, and poop jokes.

The comedy is hit-and-miss, and it’s too goofy to offend as much as it wants. But in the end, the worldview on display through the parade of idiots and violence is more scathing than maybe it thinks. At one point a North Korean propagandist (Diana Bang) discovers their plan to enact a CIA-backed overthrow of a foreign dictator and asks, “How many times will America make the same mistake?” Franco shouts back, “As many times as we have to!” Here’s a movie that says the whole world’s supremely screwed up – with dumb Americans, cruel dictators, and the empty-headed media rhetoric of them both – and the only people who eke out a win are those whose buffoons control the message. 

Left Behind: THIS IS THE END

You can almost see the good version of This is the End within it, which makes it all more disappointing this isn’t that. The concept’s solid. Some celebrities are having a party at James Franco’s house when the apocalypse happens. That’s kind of funny, right? What follows is a film that’s entirely too self-satisfied and cripplingly indulgent, resting for far too long on the audience’s assumed delight at watching recognizable faces play themselves. The only truly apocalyptic aspect of the film is the feeling that we’ve well and truly gone past the point of caring about the umpteenth narrative of stoner manchildren haltingly realizing they need to grow up. If This is the End should represent the end of anything, it should be Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and the others putting aside this played out character arc once and for all.

Filled with the gentlest of self-critical mockery and hyperbolic play with personas, the film is, for the most part, locked up in Franco’s mansion while fiery Armageddon rages outside. The opening bit of spectacle swallows up a bunch of welcome cameos and scoops up extras in the Rapture, leaving us with Franco, Rogen, Baruchel, Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride huddled together with dwindling supplies. They fight over survival strategy, have extended comic riffs, and develop spats extrapolated out of their fictional relationships. As is to be expected with this group’s standard R-rated comedy routine, there are endless gross out gags, cultural references both obscure and obvious, and lengthy conversations about every natural bodily function and a few unnatural ones as well. It’s rarely surprising, even at its most unexpected.

This has been written and directed by Rogen and his long-time writing partner Evan Goldberg. It’s pretty clear that every bit of the film is a result of a funny (more likely funny at the time) idea that either they or a member of the cast fumbled their way towards during some session of brainstorming or improvising. The result is an uneven experience, sometimes funny, usually not, as if a sloppy dorm room thought experiment has somehow made it to the big screen largely unchanged. Like, dude, what if the world was ending? And what if we hid in this house? Like, you’d be like this and I’d be like that and, oh man, you know so-and-so would totally die right away. But the difference between engaging in this kind of freewheeling teasing in a hypothetical scenario with your buddies and doing that but for a worldwide audience of moviegoers is that when a major studio bankrolls you, each dumb digression is literalized. You might think suggesting a friend would eventually get possessed and projectile vomit demon juice is a funny idea, but when seen on the screen, there’s a good chance it’ll look like overkill at best, an inside joke at worst. And so it goes here, over and over again.

I’m mostly frustrated with the way the creative energies behind this movie conjure up world-ending stakes and then use them to only poke soft fun at their public personas and circle the same tired types of jokes they’ve been making in film after film for years now.  It could be funny to take a celebrity perspective on disaster. It gets there a couple of times, like when Jonah Hill says he’d expect celebrities to be saved first: “Clooney, Bullock, me, and, then if there’s room, you guys.” But the film dwindles away into disconnected silliness that grows tedious as the claustrophobic minutes tick by, the guys repeating the same basic actions and tics. When the group finally gets out of the house, the energy picks up with the kind of surprises and surprise cameos this thing could’ve used more of. But by then we’re in the last ten or twenty minutes of the picture and it’s all too late. The movie is just a big concept filled up with small ideas, inadvertently saying the only way these guys will grow up is through the intervention of God himself.

Suburban Space Invaders: THE WATCH

Turning out to be nothing more than a belabored, R-rated commercial for Costco (actual dialogue: “They really do have everything we need!), The Watch is a halfhearted action comedy content to do nothing surprising. The story, such as it is, kicks off when the local Costco manager (Ben Stiller) shows up to work one morning to find that the store has overnight turned into a crime scene. The local cop (Will Forte) informs him that the night watchman has been mysteriously murdered. Shaken up, Stiller puts out a call for his sleepy suburb to form a neighborhood watch and is a little disappointed that the only people who respond are a needy middle aged motormouth (Vince Vaughn) who just wants a break from intruding upon his teenager’s social life, an awkward wannabe vigilante (Jonah Hill), and a bumbling British man (Richard Ayoade) who wants to join a group to fit in with the locals.

Eventually it turns out that the murderer is an alien who is simply one of many who are already in the town, poised to phone home and start the invasion proper. So, it’s up to the four flawed guys to stop the space creatures before they can move forward with their plan. Not that the film gathers any momentum from this threat. No, the movie just meanders through typical moments of male gross-out humor bonding, stumbles into a lame Invasion of the Body Snatchers lite and then lazily gets up the effort to squeak out a typical shoot-‘em-up climax.  Altogether it feels like the result of letting a bad Apatow knockoff write and direct a Hollywood remake of Attack the Block. It’s lazily paced, painfully predictable and unimaginative in all aspects, like two faded copies of copies placed one over the other.

It didn’t have to be this way. The talent involved here is promising. The cast is made up of funny, skilled performers and I haven’t even mentioned Rosemarie DeWitt, relegated to a thanklessly underwritten role as Stiller’s wife, or Doug Jones, the incredible performer behind so many great screen creatures (not the least of which is Pan’s Labyrinth’s terrifying Pale Man) who suits up to play the aliens. But the story, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (of the great raunchy teen comedy Superbad) and rewritten by Jared Stern (of the not-so-great Mr. Popper’s Penguins), is beat-by-beat dull and rote. It feels slapped together in a way that makes everyone involved appear to be shrugging towards paychecks. Everyone on screen has been vibrant and energetic, funny and sympathetic in other roles. Here, though, they’re all playing characters that are thinly sketched and vaguely off-putting while just going through the paces in a movie that can’t quite get its act together. It is witless and lame every step of the way.

The anemic script is certainly the key problem here, but it doesn’t help matters that its tone is so unformed. When it opens on Stiller narrating us through a typical day in the life of his character, the film appears to be sharpening its satirical claws on the gleaming store shelves and perfect suburban subdivisions, looking with scorn upon the hollow homogenized lifestyles of the characters. But, as more characters come into focus and the gears of the plot slowly get up to speed, it’s clear that this movie’s going nowhere fast. Strange detours into the kinky life of a creepy neighbor (Billy Crudup) and a half-formed subplot about a leering teenager (Nicholas Braun) after Vaughn’s daughter sap away momentum and cloud the tone. Are we supposed to actually validate the overzealous behavior of the central characters in so thoroughly, incompetently, poking around where they don’t belong? They’re hard to root for and when the plot resolves, it does so almost by accident.

The biggest disappointment here is the direction from Akiva Schaffer, not because it’s especially bad – it’s slick and competent – but because it’s so devoid of energy and creativity.  After directing so many terrific, hilarious Digital Shorts for Saturday Night Live and the smart-stupid new cult comedy classic Hot Rod, it’s unfortunate to see him deliver something so uninspired. There’s just about nothing here worth talking about or reacting to. I saw the movie amongst a boisterous crowd of people who, as the movie started, fell silent. As the movie played, we stayed silent. Then, a little over 90 minutes later, we all filed out. I went in hoping for a few laughs and left feeling dispirited. It’s not just bad; it’s nothing but missed opportunities all around.

Superhero Sting: THE GREEN HORNET

In theory the playfully fanciful French auteur Michel Gondry should be the perfect choice to direct a superhero movie. After all, it was similarly quirky cult favorite directors like Guillermo del Toro and Sam Raimi that helped make some of the genre’s best. Gondry’s take on The Green Hornet, star of a 1930’s radio serial who has also turned up in comics and TV shows in the intervening decades, is interesting, to say the least. He’s not given the possibility to go full masterpiece, like in his beautifully complicated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or even full on goofy and heartfelt, like in his sweet Be Kind, Rewind. Working with a script by Seth Rogen and his buddy Evan Goldberg, who have previously written Superbad and Pineapple Express, and doubtlessly shaped by market-driven forces, the movie is popcorn filmmaking that is stuck to the formula of the superhero origin story. Gondry makes it a rough-and-tumble film, though, a quick, brawling source of hit-and-miss hilarity and appealing action. It’s a thoroughly sweeded superhero flick, a chance for talented fans to take over and provide an energetic good time.

But wait, I can almost hear you asking yourself if it’s true that the idiosyncratic and charmingly phantasmagoric Gondry and the king of the R-rated comedy Rogen have collaborated on a film. Indeed it is, and it makes for an odd mix, at least at first. Gondry’s films have a loose specificity and a handmade feel, as if they were literally knitted or paper-mâché crafted into existence. Rogen’s scripts and performances, on the other hand, feel shaggy and improvised. The styles don’t quite gel at the film’s outset, though the film is also burdened with its exposition.

Rogen stars as Britt Reed, wild child heir to a prestigious newspaper mogul (Tom Wilkinson) who dies just minutes into the film. Bewildered while facing new responsibilities, he decides to do something with his life. He’s been wasting his potential and disappointing his father, a point that is belabored early and often with the overbearing work-a-holic Wilkinson juxtaposed with his party-all-the-time son. By the time an ex-employee of the father, a genius mechanic who goes by the name of Kato (Jay Chou), shows up to help Reed with his coffee machine, the movie starts to sputter to life.

For some half-believable set of reasons, Reed and Kato become quick friends and decide to take the city’s crime problem head on after they inadvertently stop a mugging that interrupts their plans of vandalism. Through a combination of newspapering and superheroics, their legend grows. At the paper, they start to spread the word about the Green Hornet, a masked menace. Head editor Edward James Olmos is wary about running what appear to be fluff pieces about an isolated incident, but secretary/criminologist Cameron Diaz finds herself intrigued. As the Green Hornet, Reed is part likeable goof, part fanboy. He leaves the heroics to Kato, who not only develops all of their gadgetry, but also flips about in super-cool Gondry-style kung-fu moves that fracture the frame and control the speed of time itself. All of these dubiously good deeds attract the attention of the local crime boss (Christoph Waltz, who is just fine here in an odd role that’s no Hans Landa) and the District Attorney (David Harbour).

At first, I wasn’t too thrilled by the movie, which has a hard time finding a persuasive or smooth way of introducing character and conflict, which leads to a messy opening act. While it never shakes its messily constructed frame, the awkward set up leads to a mostly successful payoff. The film has fun energy and conviction and by the time it enters its final third it had totally won me over. Rogen’s goofball hysterics and Gondry’s off-kilter whimsy fall into harmony and pile up into a building collection of slam-bang action set pieces that sing with delightful visual wit. The finale, an explosive encounter in a printing press, is an exuberant and inventive cacophony that left me with a smile. Though Rogen’s coarse banter and Gondry’s vivid cinematic imagination don’t seem the most natural fit, they end up melding to the well-trod formula of the superhero origin story with, despite some uneasy tonal shakiness and aimless plot convolution, some surprisingly effective excitement.