Green Lantern

Green Lantern

Directed By: Martin Campbell

Screenplay By: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldberg.

Genre: Action/Adventure

Released: June 17, 2011

Running Time: 114 Minutes

Dropps: 4.7/10 Dropps

Green Lantern is a by-the-book summer blockbuster action superhero movie… Which can be a good attribute but unfortunately this time it sticks to closely to those laurels and ends up getting stale. The movie doesn’t necessarily blow you away, or surprise you, or… well… do anything. It fits a similar mold, like that of the Transformers franchise in that there is a lot of action, a weak story, even weaker dialogue, and two characters who the audience are to believe have chemistry because they are both attractive.

Green Lantern tells the tale of The Green Lantern Corps. , an intergalactic police force that recruits its members from almost every point in the galaxy. Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is through a series of circumstances selected to be the next Green Lantern. Meanwhile, a planet destroying entity known as Parallax is heading towards Earth and only Hal Jordan can stop it. Besides the fact that the screenwriters read a “Joseph Campbell for Dummies” book, the plot is so simple and weak that it is not as captivating as it needs to be.

The Movie does so much wrong that I’ll quickly get to the parts they succeeded in. I believe that this movie was somewhat well cast. Ryan Reynolds plays the immature, sly, doubting, and handsome Hal Jordan. Reynolds gives a decent performance given the bad script, poor directing, and cliché dialogue. Most other characters are voice-only with Clancy Brown (as Parallax), Geoffrey Rush (as Tomar-Re), and Michael Clarke Duncan (as Kilowag) giving suitable performances. Mark Strong was a clever choice to play Sinestro, but was greatly underutilized in the film. That’s about all the high points in Green Lantern.

It’s just a shame that so much went poorly in the making of this film. Director Martin Campbell (GoldenEye, Casino Royale) is an accomplished action director but the action scenes in the movie were poorly edited and unimpressive. Compounding the matter is the fact that four credited screenwriters couldn’t produce more than they did. I believe that the main reason for this failure is that Warner Bros. already had plans on a trilogy before the production of the first film. This is a dangerous road because instead of focusing only on creating one solid film, they were looking to cash in on part three… A ludicrously stupid mistake. They spent about 200 million making this movie, but the SFX were only okay instead of amazing.  This is summer movie fodder, if you want to see a good superhero movie check out X-Men: First Class or wait for Captain America out next month.