Rogen plays Britt Reid, son of Los Angeles newspaper editor James Reid (Tom Wilkinson), who chastises young Britt's schoolyard heroism simply because he always fails at it. Naturally, Britt grows up to be a responsibility-shirking, hard-partying playboy who still lives with his disapproving father, and when dad dies from a bee sting, Britt is ticked that everyone remembers him as a great guy. Initially firing all of his father's household staff, he calls back the mechanic Kato (Jay Chou) because he also happens to be the one who makes the mansion's delicious coffee. The two bond over what a jerk the elder Reid could be, and when the pair find themselves in a fight with a gang of robbers while vandalizing their mutual tormenter's memorial, Britt remembers his childhood do-gooding efforts and convinces the deadly Kato to join him. He even uses his pull at the paper to make himself and Kato -- caught on tape as vandals -- out to be dangerous criminals, which would theoretically allow them to navigate the underworld unhindered. This, like most of Britt's ideas, turns out to be a terrible plan.

When it comes to playing bad guys, Britt and Kato are clueless. Britt is a tactless idiot with delusions of grandeur, and Kato is too caught up in sketching girls, building gadgets and outrunning the police to realize it until much later. The pair rely on Britt's new secretary, former criminology student Lenore (Cameron Diaz), to tell them what a criminal would do, and this brings them into the sights of insecure and murderous crimelord Benjamin Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz). Like me, Britt was confused by Diaz's presence in the movie, mostly because he can't believe she's a whopping 36 years old -- he even refers to her being in her "twilight." Luckily, she doesn't fall into the standard love-interest role (she's more of a den mother), and Waltz is similarly off-beat as a powerful man whom words can nonetheless hurt, and who usually responds to them with a double-barreled pistol, which makes quick work of dramatically arranged henchmen. (James Franco has a cameo as a club owner invading Chudnofsky's turf, and Edward Furlong plays a meth lab owner.)

A Dumb and Dumber comparison may be slightly inaccurate -- Kato is more of an idiot savant, while Britt's stupidity truly knows no bounds -- but both films feature a clichéd dress-up montage and a drag-out fight scene between the main characters, and both are pretty hilarious. A closer comparison might describe Hornet as a slightly more (or is that less?) grown-up version of Kick-Ass, with incompetent crimefighters out of their league and getting their asses kicked (Britt is the Red Mist in this scenario), but here the characters are never inspired by comic books, like Kick-Ass and TV's The Cape were. It's an easy out I was happy they avoided, and the Hornet's traditional gimmick of masquerading as a crook makes Rogen's attempts at being a bad-ass even funnier.

Other nods to the Hornet's long history: A glimpse of the original 1940s Black Beauty in the garage (the 1960s version is the regular model), young Britt's caped Lone Ranger action figure (John Reid was the Hornet's ancestor) and some dazzlingly animated 3-D closing credits that pay homage to the trippy 1960s TV opening. Gondry has fun with the fight scenes, and occasionally dips into his bag of tricks elsewhere, showing a speeded-up make-out session through Britt's dad's garage, a repeatedly splitting shot of disseminating information and a dreamlike collage of realization as Britt discovers the movie's true plot. Being a huge fan of Eternal Sunshine, I was skeptical of his signature style coming through here, but it turns out that Gondry is just as good in small doses as in big ones.

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