I think I fell asleep during this movie. Yes, you read that correctly: I think I fell asleep. But I'm not sure- which doesn't exactly say a lot about this comic book clunker starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins and Angela Bassett amongst others. I had heard that this wasn't the greatest movie ever made but had wanted to see for myself: I like Ryan Reynolds and really and truly, it's sort of dispiriting to watch DC getting clocked so consistently by Marvel at the box office. So I figured it couldn't be that bad, could it?
Turns out, it could be. The opening narration is overly complicated and done by someone who sounds an awful lot like Anthony Hopkins. (My first thought was 'Hey, it's Odin!') who explains that there's an intergalactic corps of peace keepers known as the Green Lantern Corps who keep peace, etc, etc, throughout the galaxy. Their greatest enemy was something called Parallax, who fed off of the yellow energy of fear (the green energy being that of will power- keep up already!) but was imprisoned in 'THE LOST SECTOR' on the 'RUINED PLANET RYUT.'
Well, guess what? Somebody finds 'THE LOST SECTOR' and frees Parallax just by falling into a hole. (Really good prison there, Green Lantern Corps. Well done.) Then, suddenly, its 1993. We watch young Hal Jordan cheer his test pilot father on as he starts a test flight of an experimental fighter for Ferris Industries. (There's a Carol Ferris and a Hector Hammond who are Hal's little friends along for the ride as well.) Of course, Dad dies. You know Dad is going to die as soon as he gets in the plane and there's an awesome moment where Little Hal sees his Dad getting out of the ruins of his crashed plane, starts to run towards him and then BOOM! Everything blows up.
Flash forward to the present day and Little Hal has turned into Ryan Reynolds, who is basically playing Van Wilder in a fighter jet. His fellow test pilot is a woefully miscast Blake Lively. (No offense to her, I'm sure she's awesome but she's just not believable as a fighter pilot. Katee Sackhoff, yes. Michelle Rodriguez, yes. But not Blake Lively. It's like Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist all over again.) They have a dogfight with some drones their company is trying to sell to the government and Van Wilder, I mean Hal Jordan, proves that they can only go so high before stalling. He then stalls out his own plane and proceeds to have Tom Cruise's meltdown from Top Gun. I almost expected him to start muttering 'Talk to me Goose' and have Meg Ryan pop up somewhere looking tragic and singing Jerry Lee Lewis songs.
Oh after ALL of that, we get back to Parallax. Who tracks down the Green Lantern who put him away, injures him but doesn't kill him- he get away and crash lands on Earth. Where the ring begins its selection process and guess what? It picks Hal! So now Hal has a Lantern and a ring and somehow, despite not knowing what the hell the Green Lantern Corps actually is, he says the Oath and gets sucked away in a glowing green ball to the planet Ooa where he meets and trains with the Green Lantern Corps.
There's other stuff too, but it's just too painful to recall at this point. Needless to say, I think I woke up at the crucial point in the movie where Van Wilder gets his shit together and knocks Parallax into the sun. Boom. Good guys win, bad guys lose, 'twas ever thus.
Overall: You know what this movie reminded me of? The Phantom. You know, Billy Zane in a purple suit, riding around on a horse and there's something involving skulls and rings and other weird shit- that movie was made in 1996 and it feels like Green Lantern would have done quite well in the mid-90s. Problem is that studios realized quickly that they could only get away with slapdash and crappy scripts and acting for so long with comic book movies before they would start taking hits at the box office and with Green Lantern, it feels like DC hadn't received that memo yet.
Which is a pity because I think Green Lantern deserves better. There was too much CGI that looked cheap. You never got the scale of cosmic power given to the Lanterns quite right. You never really got a sense of Hal growing into the role at all and structurally, the movie was a mess. Start here, jump there, over here- and I still don't know why I should care about Peter Sarsgaard in this movie. It's no wonder DC is getting its ass kicked by Marvel and it's no wonder they haven't been willing to put a Wonder Woman movie into production. I'd be scared too if it ended up like this. If Marvel pulls off Guardians of the Galaxy (and I think it will) then it's going to make this movie look even worse than it already is. I'm going to be clearing old some old t-shirts in the coming months, since the Missus tells me I have a surplus of them and I think I'll make room for a Green Lantern t-shirt. Most people will assume that I'm showing solidarity with Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory but really, I'll be holding out hope that someone can come along and do this character and his story justice because they haven't so far. My Verdict: * out of ****.
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