Superheroism 101, Lesson 1: never choose a sidekick who is either more super or more heroic than you are. If you’re TV’s Batman, for instance, you pick a teenage kid and dress him in a yellow cape and green hotpants. No one’s ever going to wonder which one of you is the boss. Britt Reid, also known by his crime-fighting alter-ego The Green Hornet, seems to have forgotten that lesson in the new big screen adaptation of the long running radio/TV/comic character.

Reid, as played by Seth Rogen and written by Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg, likely missed a lot of superhero classes: not only is he a major-league jerk and trust-fund layabout, but he’s also, in contrast to the usual rendering of the character, kind of an idiot. His sidekick Kato, on the other hand, is an engineering genius, a martial arts master with near-preternatural senses and also makes the best cup of cappucino that’s ever passed your lips.

Reid’s revision as a bumbling, shallow millionaire playboy, riding the coattails of his father’s success as a newspaper publisher but without a single skill of his own, is made here for comedic purposes — and injecting some humor into this franchise isn’t necessarily a bad idea. The self-serious tone of the 1960s television show was ripe for lampooning, and Rogen and Goldberg, fresh from the successes of Superbad and Pineapple Express, seemed like just the right guys to do it. A page was even taken from Pineapple‘s playbook, recruiting an indie director with serious artistic credentials — in this case Michel Gondry — to helm the affair.