Green just isn’t the superhero color this year.
Beyond its dominant hue, director Martin Campbell’s earnest, noisy “Green Lantern” has little in common with the blase comic indolence of “The Green Hornet,” which starred Seth Rogen and came out, to general disdain, five months ago. (Now there’s a name for a villain: Gen. Disdain.) The media-generated questions preceding the arrival of “Green Lantern” have focused on the question of whether Ryan Reynolds, above, who had yet to headline a major franchise effort, has the action-star stuff to shoulder a product launch such as this.
He does. Even with his somewhat reedy voice he’s an easygoing, charismatic presence, and a real actor. But the film itself is disappointingly routine, as well as jarring in its violence. Only in fits and starts, mostly in the most earthbound scenes between Reynolds and Blake Lively, does “Green Lantern” offer traces of real personality.
As test pilot Hal Jordan, destined to become an intergalactic “space cop” sporting a ring that does a lot more than decode, Reynolds has a way of playing a hotshot — who’s also a self-defeating screw-up — that seems plausible and likable. The actor’s lightly sardonic comic touch matches up well with Lively’s; she plays fellow pilot, ex-girlfriend (though the spark remains) and aerospace heiress Carol Ferris, who is thrilled with the superhero developments (wee green mask and all) in her unreliable ex’s life.
“Green Lantern” is a relationship picture, in which the man learns to be a better, more vulnerable and honest man en route to saving the planet from a fire-breathing, soul-sucking whatzit called Parallax. All the other 3,000-plus Green Lanterns, the sentinels of the universe, cannot find a way to deal with this punk, not even Hal’s fellow Green Lanternite who goes by Sinestro (Mark Strong, a credible and compelling presence). In this end of the cosmos those who slip on the evil yellow ring represent and promulgate fear, yucky and addictive and destructive. Green is good — pure, valiant willpower, like the next generation of energy drinks. more