Green Lantern [Review by Haus]

Here’s a secret: Decent movies tie my hands. Sure, they’re nice to watch, but let’s face it — they’re a bit plain to review. Point out some highlights, concoct an observation or two, but prose-wise, I’m constrained: Drive it around the block, but keep it under 30. Booooring. Writing’s so much more fun when my subject just tosses me the keys.

Green Lantern, ladies and germs, stinks. It’s a straight-up green-hued skin-tight festival of bad. It’s a neon Jordache-branded fanny pack riding low on the ample butt of superhero films. I didn’t like it. I’ll tell you why.

It’s not the talent. Hal Jordan/Green Lantern? Played by Ryan Reynolds. (I’ve liked him ever since Van Wilder.) For a villain, there’s a crazy professor played by Peter Sarsgaard (terrific in An Education). Sinestro is Mark Strong — an under-appreciated actor, great in Kick Ass and Sunshine. Even Blake Lively is in it — xoxo. And so on.

So what’s so bad? Just about everything else. Here’s a brief plot summary, helpfully glossed with explanatory parentheticals.

Hal Jordan flies fighter jets. He’s reckless – a bit of a Maverick, really – and his father died in a fighter jet, so Hal is trying to live up to his dad’s legacy. (Sound familiar?) Cue antics highlighting Hal’s unpredictable genius and heroic flaw (allegedly a mix of “fear” and “quitting,” but it’s never quite made clear). A pink alien (extraordinarily crappy CGI, btw) crash-lands on Earth and gives Hal a ring that turns him into probably the dumbest superhero imaginable (sorry, fans). Hal should be fearless — but he’s afraid! (Of what? A sequel?) Hilarity ensues as Hal travels first to some random green CGI planet populated with Star Trek knockoff aliens wearing shiny green costumes (over 3,000 of them, only four of whom figure into the story — why?), then returns to Earth to do — nothing much. His self doubt (quite valid, in my eyes) is a problem, we are told. Allegedly he overcomes this, and singlehandedly defeats a multi-legged interstellar smoke-poop with a face that threatens … which mid-size city is that? Houston? Oh, who cares.

On Earth, no world exists outside Green Lantern’s bland hometown and very small group of colleagues. And what a world it is — there’s a Senator! An Industrialist! His Hot Daughter! A Scientist! A High-Tech Weapons Company! Cliches all, thin and stereotypical and unbelievable and boring. Done better elsewhere (see, e.g., Iron Man). When Hal mopes about saving his “world,” it’s clear he means one featureless town and about seven people, none of whom we’re given any reason to care about. With nothing of interest at risk, with no meaningful threat, who needs a hero?

Green Lantern suffers from Thor-itis — namely, its (four!) writers added a high-arch intergalactic component in an apparent attempt to excuse the hero’s very limited impact on Earth. But while Thor’s earthbound antics were confined to a single tiny town and desert, Thor worked. Thor was a decent film. Green Lantern doesn’t, and is not.

Scope issues aside, this movie is largely incomprehensible. Villain #1 (the aforementioned smoldering space poop, named “Parallax”) roams the universe feeding on “fear.” He doesn’t have a plot arc so much as a randomly interspersed cameo, and “fear” seems to include both the human emotive condition and also a strange yellow bacterium that pollutes the blood. (No clarification is forthcoming, but in any case the screenwriters missed the Star Wars memo — that reducing “the force” to mere blood parasites was a terrible move. Fear is something that sticks to your red blood cells? WHAT? Also, junior scientists, take heed: that’s not what you see when you look at blood through a microscope. Like, at all.)

Which brings us to Villain #2, nutty xenobiologist Peter Sarsgaard. He becomes infected by “fear,” (the parasitic sort) and gets bulbous. (En route, he passes through a brief but distinct Jack Nicholson-circa-2010 phase.) But Sarsgaard’s character lacks any discernible motivation for the senseless and small-scale villainous acts he perpetrates, which seem mostly to involve getting back at his father. Sarsgaard is a fine actor, but he’s given less than nothing to work with here. He’s also meant to be Tim Robbins’s son, but Sarsgaard looks so haggard and Robbins so botoxed that they seem about the same age.

That’s another thing: Green Lantern is filthy with pointless family ties. Don’t even bother trying to keep track. Oh, that guy is his son? She’s the daughter of that guy? Why does that matter? It doesn’t. They’re tossed in as an afterthought to erect a facade of depth. Doesn’t work. I’ve seen deeper storylines in a ShakeWeight ad.

Green Lantern himself has the ability to conjure anything he can imagine, so long as it’s (1) green and (2) punishingly stupid. (Second criterion empirically derived by the author.) He conjures a giant Hot Wheels race track to catch a crashing helicopter (which causes far more destruction than it avoids, and is a particularly strange choice given the unlimited alternatives available to him), and a World War II era anti-aircraft gun (though not in the correct orientation — let’s conjure and then spend valuable seconds rotating the gun!).  He conjures ridiculous space-jets attached to his belt, and pillars and discs and ropes and hot rods and other nonsense. (All this almost plays as cheeky comedy — but not quite.)

Taking this material at face value for a moment, it’s unclear to me why Green Lantern doesn’t simply conjure pure willpower energy without limiting it to earthbound forms. Conjuring random earthly items perhaps made sense in the comic books simply because everyday items are easy to draw. But in this film, there’s no reason for Hal to whip up green-glowing shortswords when X-Men-style energy beams are presumably on the menu. (Hal does seem to release pure energy on one occasion, while fighting off disgruntled ex-coworkers in a damp alley. Just don’t ask — like so many other plot threads in this film, it’s dropped, never to be seen again.)

Mark Strong is squandered as Sinestro, a whole-cloth humanoid misanthrope who apparently fell asleep in his tanning bed. Sinestro toys with harnessing “fear” (wait, the emotion? Or the bacterium?) in a yellow ring, and if you’re daft enough to sit through the credits you’ll be treated to a shot of him donning this ring and turning evil. (I can’t even in good conscience call that a spoiler.) Related: A character called “Sinestro” spends the whole movie NOT being evil? (Uh oh, I feel more questions coming on. Why would our Sun kill an intergalactic space poop that’s circumnavigated countless larger stars on its way here? Why didn’t the 3000+ other Lanterns show up to help Hal? Why does this hero’s “oath” sound like a nursery rhyme? And how can he in good conscience say that “no evil” shall escape his sight, when he does absolutely nothing to stop earthly problems such as crime, poverty, war, torture, or injustice? Is he a “hero” to anyone besides the handful of people he hangs out with? How was Green Lantern green-lit? I give up.)

I’m almost tempted to cut this film some slack just because it’s clearly freighted with one of the stupidest superhero backstories around. A long-running comic like Green Lantern must have some fans; perhaps the need to satisfy their interests imposed impossible constraints on the filmmakers, forcing them to make a lousy movie. Doesn’t matter. Stand fast. We make no excuses for Green Lantern. Who’s with me?

In sum, Green Lantern doesn’t offer much. The good things in this film — bright colors, loud noises, pretty people — are cognitively available to a six year old. And even in his most sugar-stoked journal scribblings, said six year old would be damn hard pressed to craft a tale as hokey and confused as this. If you want to see stupid superhero material done right this summer, see X-Men: First Class.

HAUS VERDICT: If it’s big and it’s green, it’s probably infected.

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s review.