Review of Green Lantern (2011) by Spermian J — 01 Nov 2013

And so my movie catch up continues. I'll be honest, I went into this, knowing not a jot, bar the basics of the ring, about Green Lantern. I don't know why, but I felt deeply saddened to see Tim Robbins and his sub par performance, in this. This was more than alleviated by Peter Sarsgaard's performance, chewing scenery and stealing scenes. Ryan Reynolds' performance, both with and without the ring, is vanilla. Again, I don't know if this is true to the character's comic book origins or just the acting range of Reynolds, but this lack of range made it hard for me to connect or care about his character and the recharge scene with his supposedly 'best friend' was borderline cringeworthy and had no emotional resonance at all. I must say though, the voice work is very good, I believe I heard the (ahem) dulcet tones of Clancy Brown, but this is downplayed by my feeling that a lot of the supporting cast, Tim Robbins and Hal's family especially, phoned in a performance or maybe were just poorly directed.

Reading this back, it seems like I hated the film, it's no so much that, it has a lot of good elements, the CGI is great, I liked the story, even if it's a bit thin and the film could be 15-20 minutes shorter and feel tighter and better for it and as I said already, Sarsgaard is a joy to behold in this and alone raised my rating by half a star. Plus Blake Lively nearly makes you believe Hal/Ryan has emotions and will one day be a real boy.

3 out of 5 stars, save it for a rainy Saturday afternoon, when you've got nothing else better to do.