Review: Green Lantern

Green Lantern

6/17/11

Carmike Cinema 10

Large Mr. Pibb, few bites of popcorn

Appropriate A/C

Well, it’s happened.  Thor sort of set me up for the collapse and now I’m fully there.  I’m officially done with effects-heavy non-mainstream superhero movies.  This one had real potential too. 

Since seeing Green Lantern a few days ago I’ve figured out what my problem is:  people like me who have to be fully caught up to the origin story of these characters.  If they could just jump in with a story in the middle of what you already know, these would be much better movies and the pace would be completely different.  Not that Green Lantern was boring at all.  It was fast paced and at times very exciting.  But it takes 30 minutes or so just to set up the history of the Green Lantern.

The story picks up by telling us the origin of the “Lanterns”, protectors of the galaxy.  They spend their entire lives battling against Parallax, a former Lantern gone bad that is out to conquer the universe.  One of the top Lanterns is injured in the process and his craft crashes on Earth where he is forced to let his Green Lantern ring choose his replacement.  The ring chooses Hal Jordan, a cocky test pilot played by Ryan Reynolds.  Once he figures out that he suddenly has new powers, he flies to a far away planet, gets trained as a lantern and comes back to Earth to battle Parallax who has now invaded the body of his top rival Hector (of course) who is in love with Hal’s girlfriend Carol (of course).  Still with me?  If not, I don’t blame you. 

But look, it wasn’t all bad.  Reynolds was great.  He’s carving out a spot for himself amongst Hollywood’s top “go to” leading men.  He was funny and had all the best intentions here.  Unfortunately, he was just stuck in an effects-heavy, badly written piece of junk.  The Parallax animation was cheesy at best and the story just sort of fell flat.  I didn’t feel any emotional investment in any of the characters and certainly didn’t really cheer against the bad guy.  He was just sort of a dork with a rage problem.  And Mark Strong, who plays Sinestro, leader of the Green Lanterns just can’t seem to catch a break these days.  He was also in another clunker that should have been good, Sherlock Holmes, last year. 

The only other positive I can give it is that my 5 year old loved it.  He’s a superhero nut and I’m really hoping that Captain America is good in a few weeks or I may have to take a long break from comic book busts.

My review: 

2/4, C-, Wait for DVD