Green Lantern – Review

“In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, Beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”

I have got to admit – I am not a Green Lantern fan boy. I knew who Hal Jordan was/is, and I knew what Green Lantern’s special power was, but I was never following Green Lantern’s story as some of my friends were (I am a Marvel fan, yup). Having that said, this movie was…OK.

The movie stars Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, my goddess as Carol Ferris (my goddess being Blake Lively) and Peter Sarsgaard as a evil doctor with a very large head. The plot is the origin story for Green Lantern, Hal Jordan is this test pilot who, apparently, was chosen to replace a legendary member of the Green Lantern Corp. The movie was directed by Martin Campbell, who previously directed Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson, a movie that I was a fan of.

Honestly speaking, this movie was really OK - if you took away the fact that it was based on a comic book. The reason that I say that you have to take away that the movie was based on a comic book that had half of a century of history, and because of that, it would be really difficult to convert such a long story in a 2 hour movie (I believe that it will have a sequel, by the way.) Ryan Reynolds was awesome, as always, Peter Sarsgaard was terrific as the antagonist in the movie, because he was able to create a somehow frightening character with a relatively weak script. My goddess, Blake Lively, however, was the weakest link in the cast. Her performance was somehow wood-y, she just was not able to convey that type of emotion that would make the audience feel for her, and the way she reads lines would lead audience to believe that she was actually reading, rather than doing a performance.

The thing that made this movie only OK, and not a good movie was the writing – it was SO CHEESY. The humor was not as bad as people are saying that it was, but it was no where near good – Reynolds’ delivery was able to make up for some of the cheesy humor, but the humor was just misplaced in the movie. Pacing was another issue – the writers are trying to start way too many story arcs in a 2 hour movie – Hal Jordan’s family appeared for 2 minutes, Oa, the planet, appeared for 10 minutes, those were example of things that the writers were trying to put in the movie, but the way they did it was like how a child talks – they started a subject, and when something that appears to be more interesting shows up, they start talking about that other thing – and this happens several times in this movie. I did not have much of a problem to the CGI based direction, because I think that a story like this needs to be CGI based vision, but this was clearly an example of spectacles overpowering the story, and when the story lacks focus as this movie does, the spectacles were distracting.

Overall, the movie was OK, it was just miserably placed in a summer where we got X-Men: First Class, Thor and possibly a good movie about a war propaganda hero (Captain America), and with such good movies in comparison, this just seems a bad movie – it really was not, it was just not a good movie. I would give this movie 3 out of 5, for Reynolds’ performance and delivery, and for the CGI.