I was honestly not that excited to see Green Lantern. When I saw the trailers it looked like yet another superhero origin story. There was nothing really to differentiate it from the dozens of other superhero films we’ve seen in the past; it just looked kind of generic. Another strike was casting Blake Lively over my homegirl Keri Russell for the Carol Ferris role (although it looks like Keri dodged a bullet by losing out on the role lol). The only thing that really held my interest was that Martin Campbell, a man who’s successfully rebooted the James Bond franchise TWICE, was directing. I’m a big fan of the work I’ve seen from him and I was certainly interested in seeing him tackle a superhero story.

Unfortunately it seems like this film was made entirely by the studio intent on spending a lot of money, appealing to as broad an audience as possible, and creating a multimillion dollar franchise. All this instead of people who had a vested interest in telling a good story, crafting believable characters, and giving the audience a good summer blockbuster. The entire movie has a made by committee feel to it. Let’s throw in an action beat here, an emotional beat there, some flashback scenes here, a little romance there, etc. It felt like the studio was trying to just appeal to make a four quadrant movie and in doing so they removed any uniqueness from the movie.

The only highlights were the special effects and some inventive use of powers for the action scenes. That being said, I don’t think that the special effects were top notch. It might’ve been because I just saw Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which has some of the best special effects I’ve seen in a long time, but Green Lantern looked kind of bland at times. When Ryan Reynolds enters Oa, it feels too obviously green screen. There’s no weight to any of the movement of the CGI creations.

I did dig the way the Green Lantern used his powers. That was the only little bit of originality in the film and even that didn’t feel like it was taken advantage of to the fullest extent. That last action scene was legitimately good, but that’s all you get from this movie. That and one showdown between Green Lantern and Hector. Everything else was just kind of blah

I need to single out Mark Strong as Sinestro, who easily gave the best performance of this movie. Mark Strong is pretty much great in every single movie he’s in, but he’s really so good in this movie. It’s such a shame that such a wonderful actor and performance is wasted on a film this mediocre. 

Back to flaws of the film, the biggest problem of the movie is that it feels so bland. The movie feels designed to take people’s money by creating a superhero blockbuster that will appeal to all ages and demographics. Instead of taking chances and creating something memorable, we get something that we’ve seen a million times before in movies. Truthfully, there’s really only like six different kind of stories out there for movies to tell, but the way you tell it and what you bring to those formulas is what separates the crap films from the great. Green Lantern has almost nothing distinctive about it.

Ryan Reynolds is basically just doing his typical Ryan Reynolds schtick, which is somewhat enjoyable, but nothing we haven’t seen from him before. Blake Lively is essentially a non-entity in this film. It’s hard to believe this is the same actress who gave such a great performance in The Town, although honestly, she’s not given much to work with. Peter Sarsgaard plays yet another terrible villain in a terrible movie (which he’s been doing a lot of recently). Tim Robbins, who is supposed to be Peter Sarsgaard’s father in the movie, looks like he could be his brother. Hell, as old as he looks, Peter Sarsgaard looks like he could be Tim Robbins’s father in this movie! Apparently the characters Reynolds, Sarsgard, and Lively play all grew up together but Sarsgard is older than Reynolds and Reynolds is about a decade older than Lively. In what conceivable universe are these characters all the same age!?

Which leads to my biggest gripe about the film, none of these characters seem to have any relationships with each other outside of Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris. Hal and Carol have exactly two scenes where they are in the same frame as Hector Hammond, and that’s ALL you get to develop any kind of “bond” or “relationship” between them. The film could’ve worked if you played up this angle of a Hal/Hector relationship where Hector is jealous of Hal basically having life so easy and Hal throwing it all away. But instead, you get NOTHING and the film basically has no dramatic weight to it.

Movies like Green Lantern destroy my young idealistic hopes that blockbuster movies can be fun entertainment at the least. When movies feel like they’re being made just so studios can make a boatload of money and not because they’re trying to tell a good story or be creative with the film medium, I just can’t support that.

While I don’t think that Green Lantern is unwatchable by any means, I will say that I was looking at my watch several times during the film and thinking “when is it gonna end!?” I don’t think I need to tell you that that’s not a good thing when it comes to seeing a movie.

4/10