Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
6/20/11
Marvel and DC comics have
been at war in one way or another since they became the top two producers
of superhero comics in the early 60's. For two decades from the 1978
release of Superman: The Movie through the fizzling out of
the Batman franchise in 1997, DC utterly ruled the cinematic landscape
while Marvel's characters were relegated to direct-to-video nonsense.
That all changed with the 2000 release of X-Men, which began a relentless
march of Marvel heroes onto the big screen while DC successfully rebooted
Batman and produced a single Superman sequel that failed to restart a franchise
whose rights are slipping away from the company. Trying to turn things
around, DC and its Time Warner corporate ally Warner Bros have lavished
a couple stray hundred million dollars on the first major DC superhero
movie to star neither of the company's leading icons. Instead, Green
Lantern seeks to do what Marvel's Iron Man
did a few years back: take a character beloved by the comic-reading
faithful, make an inspired casting choice to play him and wrap it up in
an endlessly expensive uber-blockbuster that makes said character an international
marketing phenomenon. Easy, right? Well, a funny thing happened
on the way to turning Hal Jordan into the next Tony Stark. For all
Ryan Reynolds' hard work in a role that fits him like his glowing CGI super
suit, Green Lantern is really nothing more than an OK time-killer
of a superhero movie. Riddled with narrative shortcuts and underdeveloped
(though well-cast) characters, Lantern relies on its high spirits
and good intentions to get us through a plot that never catches fire.
The sequel-generating tag in the end credits doesn't just make no sense
whatsoever: it's probably wishful thinking.
A billion or so years ago,
a bunch of dudes with giant blue heads harnessed the power of will (which
apparently is green) to create a thousand or so magic rings they handed
out to a corps of heroes called the Green Lanterns who fought injustice
in every corner of the universe. One of those blue-headed dudes felt
that will just wasn't good enough and messed around with the yellow power
of fear and ended up becoming the all-consuming cloud of evil smoke known
as Parallax (voice and motion-capture face by Clancy Brown). For
a billion years or so, Parallax was imprisoned on some lost planet or other
until a few aliens got lost, landed on his planet and had their fearful
souls sucked out, beginning a new Parallax rampage. Lantern Abin
Sur (Temuera Morrison) runs afoul of the big smoky guy while checking up
one of the worlds it's completely destroyed: mortally wounded in
the struggle, he escapes toward the nearest habited planet to let his ring
choose his replacement. On Earth, test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds)
does crazy stunts both in and out of the air running from the memory of
his father's death. This, among other things, has pushed away former
flame Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). Sur's ship crashes nearby and
Hal is brought to the site by the ring's power: the alien gives him
the ring and a lantern and, before dying, tells him to “speak the oath”
to trigger its powers. Once Hal learns the oath from the lantern,
he's whisked off to the Lantern home world for training with Sinestro (Mark
Strong), Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan) and Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush).
Back on Earth, Abin Sur's body is recovered by Amanda Waller (Angela Bassett)
and her shadowy Checkmate organization. She calls upon Hector Hammond
(Peter Sarsgaard), the scientist son of a Senator (Tim Robbins) to do an
autopsy. In the process, some of that yellow Parallax goop ends up
infecting him and Hector develops amazing telepathic powers along with
some serious megalomaniacal issues. Hal throws in the towel on his
Lantern training, but finds that his glowing green suit and power to create
anything he can imagine are very much in demand. Parallax is coming,
and if the Green Lantern can't defeat it, there won't be one living soul
left on the planet Earth.
While Green Lantern
is nothing special, I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel at all because its
central character really is a great hero I'd like to see in a better movie.
Reynolds is a perfect choice for the role, with the square-jawed sincerity
to speak that utterly awesome Lantern Oath (“In brightest day... in blackest
night... no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's
might... beware my power, Green Lantern's light!”) without a twinge of
irony, while at the same time able to wink and joke his way around some
of the character's more absurd attributes. How cool is it to finally
see a superhero movie where no one who knows Hal Jordan is fooled for a
minute to see him wearing a mask? And you can't help but get behind
the central will/fear metaphor as it relates to Hal's heroic journey:
the movie is working hard to raise a generation of kids who'd do the right
thing because that's what Green Lantern would do. While Lively isn't
quite the revelation as Carol that Warner Bros.' hype machine suggested
she'd be, she's got a nice goodness and truth about her that make her the
ideal girlfriend for a hero who's power flows from his sense that he's
doing the right thing. And Taika Waititi makes a fun best friend
for Hal to bounce his Lantern brainstorming off of. Pity neither
of their characters ultimately has much to do, especially once the climax
kicks in.
The movie has a pretty nice
villain, too, in the person of Sarsgaard's Hector Hammond: the actor
is willing to go a lot farther in terms of being a jerk and a weirdo than
most would in his place, and the mutated Hector doesn't just look freaky,
but seems diseased to his very soul. Parallax is certainly cool to
look at and has an impressively sinister voice care of Brown, but the whole
“I'm gonna make trouble for a while until the big cloud of smoke shows
up to destroy the world” structure makes Lantern play a lot more
like a remake of Fantastic Four:
Rise of the Silver Surfer than any movie should particularly care to.
And the business on the Lantern home planet (I can't bring myself to look
up its name) is a non-starter: boatloads of mythology and visual
effects, but not one interesting character. The training sequence,
which probably doesn't last more than five minutes, seems to enter a wormhole
and go on for an eternity. And, as I mentioned previously, what one
of those other Lanterns does during the end credits makes not one lick
of sense in light of everything that's come before.
The world at large tends
to think a lot more of Martin Campbell's body of work than I do:
while movies like GoldenEye, Casino
Royale and The Mask of Zorro are beloved blockbusters, I found
them all to play a bit back on their heels, and Green Lantern is
much the same way. Oh, I can sit here and break down for you how
many shot transitions seem to be missing, how little effort the movie makes
to actually motivate its characters from one action to the next and all
that, but the bottom line is that I never found much of any of it to be
all that exciting. It's fun to hang out with Hal Jordan, and I certainly
hope he stops Parallax before that big cloud shows up in Palmyra and sucks
out my soul, but there's no thrill to most of it. And, aside from
that iconic giant fist that takes out some guys looking to beat up Hal
in an alley, the constructs our hero uses the ring to create are definitely
playing more to the kids in the audience than to me. Although I did
appreciate that when Hal creates a structure to hold the weight of some
heavy falling object, it has a lot of support beams. But what exactly
is the deal with that mask, which the script informs me appears whenever
he needs it to hide his identity, but always seems to be around when he's
alone in a room with people who know exactly who he is?
One thing Campbell does do
well is deliver the 3D: Hal's shimmering suit, the bubbles and flares
of green energy that surround all his heroic deeds, and especially that
thundering cloud of Parallax are very impressive three-dimensional sights.
But the story they're helping to tell remains stubbornly two-dimensional.
I can spend all day rattling off movies that couldn't quite lick their
franchise aspirations on the first try, somehow got a sequel and did better
the second time around (Blade, The Mummy, even Star Trek:
The Motion Picture if you want to go back a ways), so I'm not exactly
rooting against a Green Lantern 2. But I am rooting against
one with the same creative team. Hal Jordan and his magic ring alone
were enough to keep me entertained for two hours, so they deserve a lot
better than this. |
