By: Neil Smith
Highly anticipated by comic book fans, The Green Lantern falls short of its billing as a player among the big action franchises.
We're hardly starved of superheroes this summer what with Thor, X-Men: First Class and the upcoming Captain America. And even if that was not the case, Green Lantern would still have to deal with being beaten into cinemas by The Green Hornet, another crime-fighter sporting an emerald mask.
Comic book aficionados, of course, will have no problem distinguishing the vigilante playboy from Michel Gondry's flick and the ring-wearing hero of Martin Campbell's. For the rest of us, though, Green Lantern arrives with formidable hurdles to overcome - not least some distinctly cheesy CGI and a hokey mythology that, thanks to a turgid opening voiceover from Geoffrey Rush, threatens to drown us in exposition before we have as much as sat down.
Turns out, you see, the universe has been guarded for millennia by the Green Lantern Corps, an elite cadre of warriors who each derive their abilities from a ring forged on their home planet of Oa. Said ring enables them to read minds, fly through space and create anything their minds can imagine. Unfortunately one of their number, Parallax, has gone to the dark side and is now a gigantic cloud that swallows up everything that stands in its way.
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That's bad news for Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), a purple-headed alien who crash-lands on Earth after being mortally wounded by his inter-galactic nemesis. Before he croaks, though, he must find a worthy wearer of his finger ornament - something that maverick fighter pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) looks like anything but.
Yet the ring is never wrong, obliging Jordan to travel to Oa and learn the ways of the Green Lanterns from the sceptical Sinestro (Mark Strong), fish-bird creature Tomar-Re (Rush) and burly trainer Killawog (a rhino-like beast rather unfortunately voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan). Back on Earth, meanwhile, Parallax is already causing problems, having infected nerdy boffin Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) with its evil plasma and turned him into a cackling psychopath with a grotesquely distended cranium.
Fan boys were up in arms last year on learning that the chartreuse costume Reynolds sports would be wholly computer-generated. They're hardly likely to be any happier with the movie as a whole, replete as it is with inferior imagery that doesn't look any better for being in 3D. At no point does Hal seem part of his surroundings when he is on Oa, a flaw replicated on Earth by the green "constructs" he summons up out of the ether. The result is a film that looks and feels false, making you wonder why they did not just go the full hog and make a cartoon.
Throw in a typically smug and self-satisfied turn from walking torso Ryan Reynolds, a barely-there perf from Blake Lively as his anonymous love interest and phoned-in villainy from Sarsgaard and you're left with a fantasy that's anything but fantastic. Is this really the same director who gave us GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro and Casino Royale?
Verdict: Don't count on Lantern bringing in the green.
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