Green Lantern review

Green Lantern (12A, 114 mins)
Director: Martin Campbell

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Comic books heroes have been treated fairly well at the movies so far this summer, but this adaptation of the DC property has to be viewed as a backwards step. It begins with a cosmically silly prologue telling us all about the Green Lantern corps, an intergalactic peacekeeping force whose mystical green rings give them the power to do almost anything.

When one of their number is critically injured while battling a super-foe, he makes his way to earth to use the ring to choose the next Lantern. This turns out to be Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a hotshot test pilot, whose cocky, reckless nature at first seems at odds with the stoicism of the other 3599 Lanterns, but it’s nothing a training montage can’t fix.

So with the Lantern home planet and earth under threat from the extremely powerful super-baddie, as well as Peter Sarsgaard’s scientist-turned-telekinetic-freakshow, Hal must overcome his human fears and weaknesses and save the day.

On the one hand, there’s not much to actively dislike about Green Lantern. It’s not aggressively stupid, just colossally goofy, with its endless references to the green power of will and the yellow power of fear, and as mythologies go it’s fairly out there.

Most accountable is the one-note script that spends an hour on the most cliched, cheesiest setup imaginable, all dead fathers and flimsy motivations, followed by a sustained burst of passable action. It does look good and the special effects are solid, but it’s just too puerile to be engaging, though the ever-likeable Reynolds does his best, and too reminiscent of kid-friendly chores like Fantastic Four to come close to the more mature and satisfying adventures of recent years.