Green Lantern feels like a recycled story

Beware the powers of glowing galactic jewelry, especially items made not of emeralds but the emerald-coloured energy of willpower. You can do pretty much anything you want with it, a good reason why it’s only given out to those who only do good things.

Thanks to Green Lantern, that group also includes Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds). If Tom Cruise’s Maverick from Top Gun had a younger, cockier brother, he would be it. He’s the kind of fighter pilot who would risk flying into the upper levels of the stratosphere just to win a test combat situation. So what if he ends up destroying the plane and risks imminent death? He has no fear.

Jordan gets recruited into the Green Lantern Corps, a space-based police force called the Guardians of the Universe. It has 3,600 members but Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison) was the only one who could defeat and imprison Parallax, the entity that feeds on fear. When the being escapes, it attacks Abin Sur, who must escape to Earth and find a new successor to his ring. It chooses Jordan and the egotistical flyer must step up to take a higher path, one that involves unlimited creative potential.

He turns into a mean, green fighting machine who must prove once and for all that he really does have the right stuff.

To help him along with his preparations, he is mentored on the planet Oa by the fish-like Tomar-Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush) and given brutal physical training by Kilowog, the kind of bald, large, wide-shouldered, deep-voiced and heavy-handed alien that only Michael Clarke Duncan could possibly portray. He looks and acts like a mean warthog mixed with a pachycephalosaurus.

Jordan is an excellent student but Corps leader Sinestro (Mark Strong) is not so impressed with a human on the team. We are a green species in the big scheme of things, and not quite so advanced. Jordan quits and heads home but keeps the ring and the lantern just in case.

Good thing, since government scientist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgard) is enlisted to examine and dissect the alien body of Abin Sur. While doing so, he is infected with a remnant of Parallax, becoming stronger and more evil with the power of fear. He becomes grotesque in his body and his spirit, jealous over Jordan’s relationship with Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). A showdown between green will and yellow fear is inevitable.

I have to admit that I have always felt that Ryan Reynolds is one of those actors who has good looks and nice teeth on his side, but not too much charisma or ability to successfully act in a range of roles. Again, the comparison to Tom Cruise is apt. His likeability will only get him so far, though.

It’s really just a new trend that has become endemic: the problem of too many pretty people who can’t act. Count Reynolds and his love interest here as leaders in this group. He and Blake Lively are about as believable as test fighter pilots as Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel were six years ago in Stealth. This movie had as many groans as Stealth did and seems to have many similar plot elements as the recent Green Hornet. It certainly didn’t have the character development from Citizen Kane to make up for it. Here, even the good actors like Tim Robbins and Peter Sarsgard seem like they’re just around for the paycheque.

Strangely it might also be the one exception for being far too short for what it was trying to accomplish and what it should have achieved for a first film in a franchise. This should have been an easy two-and-a-half hours and it would have been so much better.

This movie is only green, not because it’s fresh and interesting like good vegetables, but rather for the fact that it comes across more like a recycled story from the superhero recipe book. If that’s the analogy, then this movie is expired food. Maybe that means it’s green from fungus growing on it. It must be time to take this one out of the fridge and put it in the waste bin.