GREEN LANTERN FAILS TO SHINE

As I’ve previously stated, in terms of Comic books my allegiances are with Marvel as opposed to DC when it comes to the mainstream (each their own). Over the last few years Marvel’s movie’s have been pretty good; Iron Man and Avengers in particular along with the X-Men franchise (I have yet to see the new incarnation of Spider-Man) have all been entertaining whereas DC’s output is only worth talking about in quality terms when referring to Nolan’s excellent Batman movies. Of course DC probably produced the godfather of comic book movies with Richard Donner’s Superman but that was in the seventies.

I recently watched the Green Lantern movie; it was on Sky Anytime, it was raining, I was ill on the sofa. I have to say that Hal Jordan’s alter-ego is quite an interesting character as written but this movie is quite frankly awful.

Coming from the director of Goldeneye I had reasonably high hopes for this film; those hopes were dashed early on with the interminable exposition, the shoddy CGi, the lack of anything approaching characterisation from Ryan Reynolds in the lead role. As for the villain of the piece, well let’s just say that he was a mess of overblown effects. Tim Robbins sleepwalks through the movie and Mark Strong can only have needed an injection of cash.

There is something terribly ‘Phantom Menace’ about this movie. It is loud with eye popping set pieces but still manages to be boring. Chemistry between the romantically entwined leads Reynolds and Blake Lively is non existent as is any sense of drama.

Green Lantern is an equivalant to Iron Man in terms of the characters ranking in their respective DC/Marvel Universes and as such needed to up the ante to gain followers. If DC is to produce more movies featuring their large rota of heroes, most of whom have years of stories to access, they need to do it better than this, much better.