Remember when you were a kid, and someone in the schoolyard would throw something at your head and shout, “Think fast!” That’s what Green Lantern is all about.
Green Lantern is one very busy movie: There’s some romance, a father-son relationship gone awry, a tainted science experiment, and a cameo by, I believe, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Green Lantern is also a big emerald mess, with bombastic visual effects and a musical score that is much too loud.
Did you know that our universe has conveniently been divided into 3,600 sectors, each of them with its own intergalactic peacekeeper? You can rest easy, because each of these Green Lanterns wears a very special, very powerful ring. Problem is, on a planet in a sector far, far away, things are starting to go terribly wrong.
Meanwhile, on Earth, talented, daring, cocky test pilot Hal Jordan is showing people how good he is at flying an F-35, even if he’s sometimes flashing back to the day, years earlier, when his talented and daring (but not cocky) test pilot daddy died in a fiery crash.
When disaster strikes for one particular Green Lantern, his ring “chooses” Hal to replace him, expecting him to be honorable and responsible while he saves … oh, little kids, old ladies, his girlfriend. Basically, the whole damn world.
The big question among the other 3,599 Green Lanterns is whether or not a lowly human could actually be up to the task. (Funny, I was thinking that same thing about the actors.)
It turns out that as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, Ryan Reynolds is effective in showing comic flashes of mischief and serious glimpses of self-doubt. But he comes across as too flat for the character. As companion test pilot Carol Ferris, Blake Lively plays it more
snippy and spoiled than interesting and attractive.
At least Peter Sarsgaard, a darling of the indie film set, gets to chew the scenery while playing bad guy Hector Hammond. If award nominations were given for doing over-the-top villains in poor superhero movies, Sarsgaard would absolutely get mine.
Green Lantern’s coolest power is the ability to use his imagination to do or create anything. When he finally faces off against the “unbeatable” monster, he has to think fast. But instead of creating some super-duper weapon, he inanely conjures up a silly and ineffective machine gun. For help with their own imaginations, I guess the filmmakers weren’t wearing any big green rings.
