With so many super hero movies inhabiting our screens over the last few years, comic book based films have largely had to stay fresh and interesting to keep audiences interested. So instead of the usual superhero origin tale like Superman - The Movie or Sam Raimi's Spider-Man we've had weird and wonderful yarns like Hellboy, Thor, LXG, Watchmen, Super and Kick Ass, which all add new and interesting spins on the standard super hero template. Unfortunately Warner's Green Lantern adaptation plays the universal super hero origin story playbook step by step. The last time it was done this closely to the comic book bible was Marvel's Iron Man in 2008. But thanks to a revelatory star turn by Robert Downey Jnr, some deft direction by Jon Favreau who managed to balance the fun and humorous with the intense and dramatic, and a fast moving, witty script the film was a winner.
Green Lantern's script is a mess. When it should be bold, exciting and imaginative it's instead predictable and Earthbound. And when the movie does get to spread it's wings showing the Green Lantern Corps, outer space battles and the traing sequences as hero Hal gets to train in the use of his powerful magic ring...it all feels rushed and all too brief. This might be down to the fact the studio, the normally reliable Warner Brothers, lost their bottle when it came to the more fantastical elements in the story, fearing they will put off a mainstream audience with limited imagination. Or, even with a gigantic $200 million budget, they didn't have enough money to give Green Lantern the true interstellar adventure he deserved.
Ryan Reynolds (deserving to be an A-list actor but the films he's in keep letting him down) does his best but he can't raise the fun level much above the base line. And everybody else is simply OK. Blake Lively is pretty but blank, Peter Sarsgaard is mainly low-key as the Earthbound baddie (he's entertainingly bonkers in one short scene and then he returns to subdued and dull) and the rest of the cast aren't well written enough to have any impact whatsoever.
Tonally it's a mess too. Good though they are, the spacebound scenes are a little jarring up against the Earth set stuff...something this summers Thor didn't have a problem with. And dramatically it doesn't flow very well. Hal mopes around a lot trying to decide if he wants the responsibility of being an interstellar policeman, but since he uses the ring when he needs to, it's never in doubt that he will take up the mantle. Also, his love/hate relationship doesn't make a whole lot of sense as if whole chunks of dialogue have been chopped out and left on the cutting room floor.
Although the film looks gorgeous and the effects work is pretty solid (as long as you don't have an allergic reaction to CGI) the over-abundance of unimaginative and talky Earthbound stuff often gives the film a TV pilot feel. If the official numbers are to be believed Green Lantern has a budget $5 million more than the latest Transformers film, which frankly has every cent of it's $195 million budget up on the screen.
It's not bad at all, but for a movie with a great star, a dependable director and based on a hot and wacky comic book property, it's disappointingly so so.
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