When I was young, I accidentally punched a hole in the side of our garage wall with a wayward snow shovel. Terrified at the implications once my mother returned from work, I did the only thing I could think of: I taped a piece of notebook paper across the sizable gouge and painted over the whole thing. It looked fine for a while, but after a few months the paint began to crack, the paper began to disintegrate and both my initial accident and the ill-conceived cover-up were exposed. The Green Lantern takes the same approach to filmmaking, trying to compensate for a colossally awful story by throwing countless special effects at the viewer. There hasn’t been this much green (see how I did that?) screen since the Star Wars prequels.

Unknown to humanity, a force for good exists in the universe that guards against the spread of evil. That force is the Green Lantern Corps., a small but powerful brotherhood of protectors cobbled together from the universe’s countless races and dedicated to keeping the intergalactic peace. But when Parallax, an ancient enemy from within their own ranks, threatens to overthrow the galaxy, the fate of the cadre and of Earth is in the hands of the greenest (get it!?) recruit and the first human ever chosen to be a Green Lantern. Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is as exceptionally talented a test pilot as he is a cocky and reckless one. But Hal will have to overcome the personal demons that drive his behavior if he is to save the planet and, naturally, get the girl (Blake Lively).

Everything about The Green Lantern screams amateur hour, even though many of those behind the film are anything but. Director Martin Campbell helmed the peerless James Bond reboot Casino Royale, screenwriter Michael Goldenberg wrote Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and lead actor Ryan Reynolds has enough charisma for three men. So what happened? If serendipity is a collision of happy accidents that produce something greater than the sum of their parts, then The Green Lantern is its unlucky antonym, a film far less impressive than its superior individual ingredients. Those in front of and behind The Green Lantern were simply in over their heads, likely assuming their film was imbued with a far greater sense of magisterial gravity than anyone other than a handful of fanboys would ever grant it.

Ryan Reynolds shouldn’t be blamed for this titanic mess. He is blessed with the ability to be as funny as he is dramatic, a rare commodity and one that serves him, if not the movie, well. And Lively, while also doing nothing to embarrass the family name, is simply too young an actress to be taken seriously as a fighter pilot and vice-president of a major defense contractor.

Though I will doubtless upset some of the aforementioned fanboys with what I say next, The Green Lantern is far too silly to interest the average, uninitiated moviegoer. The Green Lanterns each derive their superpowers from a ring that allows them to harness the cosmos’ most powerful energy source: willpower (insert snicker here), as opposed to its most malevolent force, the yellow power of fear (repeat as often as necessary). The ring grants its wearer the ability to create out of thin air anything he imagines. But just because we can imagine a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must produce that thing. How are we supposed to take The Green Lantern seriously when it cannot even take itself seriously—rightly mocking its hero in the script for saving a crashing helicopter by slapping race car wheels on it and driving it away on an elevated track? This is but one example of the sorts of tools Hal comes up with to vanquish evil that are, while technically effective, the sort of solutions a child playing with his toys in the corner would imagine. Perhaps it is this sort of glaring ineptitude that prevents our blood pressure from ever spiking at any point during the film.

The Green Lantern, like Thor before it, is more cartoon than movie, relying on CGI to cover its multitude of sins. And like Thor, The Green Lantern spends much of its running time off Earth with aliens with massive craniums who look as it they were stolen wholesale from the original Star Trek pilot. Rather than injecting a sense of celestial awe to the proceedings as the filmmakers no doubt hoped, we are distanced from any emotive power the script might possess; the very people we should care about are left remote and inaccessible. It is out in this inky blackness of space that Parallax lives, clearly the elder smoke monster from the Lost television series. This scourge of the galaxy and greatest threat to the Corps.’ existence is dispatched by our newbie hero in less than five minutes (oh come on, is that really a spoiler!?), leading us to wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place. The film does also have a human villain played by Peter Sarsgaard, but his part, near as I could tell, was just to scream like a little girl every time the camera was pointed at him.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Martin Campbell
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Angela Bassett, Tim Robbins, Temuera Morrison, Jay O. Sanders, Taika Waititi, Jon Tenney, Mike Doyle, Dylan James, Gattlin Griffith, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan, Clancy Brown
Rated PG-13 for violence.
Running Time: 114 minutes