An Asian Action Comedy…From Seth Rogen?

It’s been known for a while now that Seth Rogan would be starring in a big screen adaptation of The Green Hornet (which he is co-writing with his Superbad/Pineapple Express partner Evan Goldberg). Rogen seemed excited about it and had some sort of concept involving a superhero who is frustratingly less famous than his sidekick. I guess that’s not a bad concept, but given that the Green Hornet movie has been languishing in development hell for over a decade (both George Clooney and Kevin Smith were attached at different points), it just always struck me as a project that was destined to fail. However, today an announcement was made that suddenly made the whole project seem worthwhile. Stephen Chow has signed on to direct and play Kato.

I know most of you probably responded to that news with a resounding “huh?,” so I’ll explain who that is. Stephen Chow is the remarkable actor/director behind Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer. He has proven in those and many other films to have a natural talent for combining complicated kung fu action scenes with broad slapstick comedy. It’s a truly bizarre style of filmmaking and one that should be perfectly suited the The Green Hornet. With Pineapple Express, Rogen and Goldberg have proven to be quite adept at combining action and comedy. So with a brilliant filmmaker like Chow orchestrating the action behind the camera, the results could be spectacular.

This move also illustrates Rogen and Judd Apatow’s commitment to hiring talented and appropriate filmmakers to direct their scripts. Most Hollywood comedies are directed by placid personality-less filmmakers so that the actors and writers can have more control, but the Apatow/Rogen team has made an effort to hire interesting independent directors like David Gordon Green and Greg Mottola to put their own stamp on the project. Now they’ve even gone overseas to bring in a foreign filmmaker to direct his first Hollywood project. This shows a interest in quality filmmaking that is normally not a factor in comedies. It will still be quite a while before this project will hit screens, but the concept of combining Seth Rogen’s style of comedy with the man who directed this insane sequence should be enough to justify early excitement.