“In brightest day, in blackest night…”
With a screenplay that was conceived in what will undoubtedly be remembered by the four writers who contributed to it as the blackest night of their creative lives, Green Lantern may well be the most punishingly idiotic superhero movie since…well, I’m going to have to go back to the pocketful of box office kryptonite that was Supergirl.
This isn’t a respectable failure, like, say, Ang Lee’s Hulk, which was a movie that took chances that never paid off. This is a film that is a studied replication of the template for superhero origin stories — and once that architecture has been clamped down on the story more tightly than Ryan Reynolds’ digitized green leotard, the dialogue was apparently fed through some sort of automated comic book movie script generator to finish things off.
“…No evil shall escape my sight.”
And nothing but empty platitudes and hammy jokes can escape these actors’ lips thanks to the screenwriting-by-committee approach. “Watch your back,” one character tells Reynolds’ Hal Jordan, who fires back a deadpan, “that’s impossible.” It’s as if someone decided that if they were going to have the star of Van Wilder in the movie, they might as well give him some hacky third-rate National Lampoon punchlines. Reynolds can make that kind of material charming better than almost anyone short of Chevy Chase, but he’s fighting a losing battle here, with a comic character so two-dimensional he seems determined to leap back on the page, rather than off of it.
Don’t even get me started on the awful self-help mumbo-jumbo Blake Lively’s Carol Ferris uses to inspire Jordan when he’s doing the usual “I’m not worthy” routine. I think I’m accurately summing up the monologue that’s meant to form the movie’s dull approximation of an emotional center when I say it’s something along the lines of, “There’s nothing to fear but the fear of fear itself! So, uh…don’t be afraid to be fearful. Also: Courage! You should get some! Because that overcomes the fear you shouldn’t be afraid of having!” Lively’s delivery wouldn’t inspire me to get up to use the bathroom if I was about to pee my pants, let alone save the world.
“Let those who worship evil’s might…”
The movie kneels so piously at the alter of The Formula that you may find it more entertaining to imagine in your head your own variations of what’s happening on-screen. The only reason to pay any attention is so you can mark the squares on NPR’s convenient superhero bingo card. (Spoiler: you’re going to win.)
Jordan is, of course, the reluctant hero. He’s a reckless but gifted fighter pilot haunted by the memory of his father’s death. He’s essentially Top Gun‘s Maverick, but since this is 2011, I guess his ego is paying with debit cards his body keeps declining.
The Green Lanterns are a corps of intergalactic cops helping a race of tiny beings called The Guardians keep order in the universe. The Lanterns are like Riggs and Murtaugh in glowy spandex, the Guardians are the gruff captain, only if he’d looked like a more comically ridiculous version of that little blue guy from Megamind.
Jordan is chosen to replace the former Green Lantern assigned to Earth’s sector after that Lantern suffers a mortal injury at the hands of Unspeakable Evil. With the ring that gives members of the corps their power, Jordan is able to use its energy to create anything that he can imagine, if only he wills it. But after a disastrous training montage, he figures he doesn’t really want the responsibility that goes with all that power. The only problem is that his would-be girlfriend back home isn’t really into quitters. That, and the nerdy kid from high school who has always been jealous of Jordan is about to help bring about the end of the world. (That would be Peter Sarsgaard, made up to look so much like a pedophile, one wonders how he’d even get an interview to become a teacher.)
So, with two reasons to get himself sorted out — the promise of eventual sex, and an excuse to give this creepy Poindexter a super-powered wedgie — it’s pretty clear that Hal’s going to find the will to overcome his fear with courage while never forgetting that you can’t be afraid to be fearful, or…good lord, this thing is a mess.
“Beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”
About that light show: were you hoping to at least be treated to a big, dumb visual spectacle for your $11 ($15 if you’re wildly optimistic enough to think the 3D is going to help)? I mean, they did spend $200 million dollars on this thing. It couldn’t have all gone to craft services and Ryan Reynolds’ personal trainer, could it? Alas, Green Lantern looks cheap and cartoonish. And not Pixar cartoonish, either. They might actually have been able to make some of this not look like an embarrassment.
When a person says they don’t like comic book movies, this is what they’re talking about. This is every bad comic book movie cliche, stuffed into one neon green pinnacle of dull, unoriginal moviemaking. If superhero movies reach the saturation point where audiences finally say, “you know, I’m done with these for a while,” Green Lantern will be the movie that put them over the top.
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Green Lantern
Directed by Martin Campbell
Written by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldenberg
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong
Running time: 105 minutes
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action.
Opens today at theaters across the area.
