Any good superhero movie requires four basic components to be taken seriously; a sense of realism, a menacing villain, good action, and some kind of story to move the film along. Unfortunately, Green Lantern possesses none of these things, and instead tries to get by on its appealing leads and grandiose special effects. It fails. Miserably. As charming as Ryan Reynolds, he can’t seem to give the boring and trite screenplay any charisma or excitement. He’s underused and overworked in many cases, just like the film’s potential.

Green Lantern follows pilot Hal Jordan, an irresponsible and charming man-child, who after an almost fatal crash, is then chosen to be the next Green Lantern, and the first human one at that. Being a Green Lantern requires a lot of discipline and responsibility that seems to be lacking in Mr. Jordan, even at his best. It’s during this time that he learns the value of life, and any other moral cliché that one can infer. His love interest is fellow pilot Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). All their scenes together made me extremely irritated because the two actors had no chemistry, and every time their conversations started with some kind of endearing emotion, they always end with a fight or disagreement of some kind. The love interest is supposed to inspire and make the protagonist happy, it can’t be one or the other. The villain, if he can be even called that, is none other than Dr. Hector Hammond. Peter Sarsgaard is sorely miscast in the role, and I saw that even in the trailer, he just looked, well, a little awkward in his position. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a fine actor, but his voice is too reassuring for him to be anything but nice and helpful. As a villain in the film, he comes off as too sensitive and prissy, like being a villain is kind of a drag. His transformation (which I won’t go into too much detail about) is less frightening, rather than it is just ugly. He looked like the little slugs from the movie Slither bit him.

Only 3.5 of the many talented actors in this film are actually recognizable; Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Tim Robbins, and sometimes Peter Sarsgaard. All the others either have too much make up on them (i.e. Mark Strong), or are just completely animated (Michael Clarke Duncan, Geoffrey Rush, Clancy Brown, etc). Maybe this was done on purpose to shield those with some artistic integrity, and deflect critics from the fact that, yes, I did indeed participate in Green Lantern. Apart from the lack of live action for most of the movie, it’s really just an overproduced movie. The budget for this was $200 Million Dollars, and you know how many honest-to-God action scenes there were? None. Green Lantern really only performed two true acts of heroism, and neither included anything resembling fighting. More like Green Lantern just thinking of cool weapons, shooting them for a few seconds, and then crashing into the Sun. Add that to the equation of there already being little to no plot, and a plethora of unnecessary characters, and that’s pretty much what Green Lantern has to offer, boring, unoriginal, unnecessarily loud, and a huge waste of potential. If it wasn’t so loud the entire time (even the dialogue is set at an IMAX level), I probably would’ve fallen asleep. The whole thing is just too silly to take seriously, and therein lies the problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re leaving the Milky Way to go talk to some aliens, it would’ve been nice to actually feel like something of this magnitude could actually happen.

Grade: D+