It’s shocking how little $150 million buys you in Hollywood these days. That galactic sum is the estimated production price tag swinging from “Green Lantern,” the chintzy-looking movie featuring the emerald-hued superhero who’s been riding high and low on and off the comic-book circuit since 1940. But there’s no keeping a masked avenger down, especially a contender in cross-marketing promotion. Do you want Green Lantern tie-in Doritos or Reese’s with your tie-in Lipton Brisk green-tea beverage? (After the sugar rush subsides, settle in with the newly published “Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape This Book.”)
The little weird creatures in the movie with the puckered heads certainly look as if they could use some hydration. Called the Guardians of the Universe, these are basically Yoda multiplied, wizened immortals who live on the planet Oa and were originally drawn to look like, no kidding, the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. In the movie, presumably select members perch on individual power towers and wear long robes that drape from their bodies like portable red carpets, regulation alien bobble heads who are part Mr. Burns, part Metamucil candidate. They dispense orders and gnomic wisdom to the Green Lantern Corps, an interplanetary transspecies force that patrols the universe like beat cops and soon includes the earthling Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a test pilot.
Hal joins the Lanterns after being tapped by a dying alien and voicing the oath that characterizes him as much as his duds. (“In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight.”)
It’s a gig that comes with the familiar superperks like a damsel to rescue and a world to save, and is served up with the customary drawbacks, like a shiny (digital) unitard and villainy. First, though, Hal has to fight the usual demons (notably dear old dead Dad) to become the champion he was chosen to be, a task impeded by lame jokes; evocations of better movies (the 1970s “Superman” included); an ugly-bruise palette of black, green and purple; and a formulaic script that mechanically switches among story threads as TV shows often do.
Bored yet? I’ll try to snap it up better than the team behind “Green Lantern” did or maybe could. Fronting the production are the director Martin Campbell, whose résumé includes the James Bond reboot “Casino Royale,” and the writers Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg, whose credits stretch from DC Comics to the HBO series “Sex and the City.” (Odds are a few script doctors hovered over the patient too.) Warner Brothers is banking big on “Green Lantern,” to some extent because the Harry Potter franchise finishes up this summer. Another property needs to keep the cash flowing, and one way the company plans to do so is by raiding, er, maximizing DC Comics, one of the satellites in the Time Warner entertainment universe.
The reason this matters to moviegoers is that if Warner Brothers doesn’t invest in quality — as it did with Christopher Nolan’s excellent Batman films — more substandard diversions like “Green Lantern” (and those previous DC big-screen bummers “Watchmen” and “Jonah Hex”) will be flooding multiplexes for the foreseeable future. If the company is going to shove a property like “Green Lantern” down consumer throats — drilling it into your child’s consciousness, sweet tooth, toy emporium and anywhere else the company can place its brand — the least it can do is give us a good movie.
And “Green Lantern” is bad. This despite Mr. Reynolds’s dazzling dentistry, hard-body physique and earnest efforts, and the support of fine performers like Peter Sarsgaard (as Hector Hammond, a nutty professor turned baddie), Mark Strong (almost unrecognizable as the fuchsia-tinted Sinestro) and Angela Bassett (Doctor Waller, a government drone in mile-high heels). They, along with Blake Lively, who plays Carol Ferris, a pilot and aeronautics executive, and who’s miscast on both counts, look as if they’re working hard, and not only to keep a straight face. Only Mr. Sarsgaard, who invests his transformation with levity, earning grateful laughter, shoulders the lugubriosity well, rising above the scripted clichés and dreary battles, featuring an alien enemy with a skull head and the body of a dryer-lint octopus.
In comics, the Green Lantern has been through blackest night but here he’s a typical DC Golden Age do-gooder, as unambiguous as when he was revived in the Silver Age 1959 and looked like Paul Newman. Mr. Reynolds isn’t wrong for the job; the movie is. One issue is tone and hitting the sweet spot between sincerity and self-awareness that can work for today and that made the first “Superman” movies fly in an age of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate cynicism. It’s also about finding a reason for superheroes beyond the box office, which leads to the question troubling every superhero movie in which the protagonist isn’t as twisted as Batman is now or as ironic as Iron Man: Is there still a place in American movies for square heroes?
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