/ 24 June 2011

Lantern lacks spark

Lantern Lacks Spark

If the movie of Green Lantern is creaky, perhaps it’s because its hero is one of the oldest superheroes to emerge — Superman is older, born in 1938, and the Spirit appeared just before Green Lantern in the early 1940s.

Superman, of course, has acquired a rich cinematic history; less successfully, the movie of The Spirit a few years ago looked good but had a rather weak storyline.

Green Lantern, too, has a weak story. And it doesn’t look terribly good either.

A host of the usual clichés turn up as we watch young tearaway fighter pilot Hal Jordan (who has father issues) chosen for green-lanternhood by a ring from outer space, an event soon followed by the assault on Earth itself of a whole lot of grimy, swirling, snarling CGI.

No mucking about with a few nuclear warheads, as in X-Men: First Class, let alone mere twisted criminal masterminds such as the Joker or the Penguin — no, this great cloud of evil is simply going to swallow Earth whole.

In the same vein, the powers given to Hal as he becomes Green Lantern, or a Green Lantern (for this is an intergalactic police force), are conveniently broad. He just has to imagine something in his mind and there it is, to be used in the service of good. Unfortunately, whatever he conjures into being, from racetracks in mid-air to banks of machine guns, comes only in green — and in a semi-transparent, shiny green, which makes all his conjurations look a bit like Tupperware.

Oh, and he can fly, so the filmmakers do a reprise of the Spider-Man sequences in which Spidey swoops joyfully between towering buildings.

Faithful to the source

Otherwise Hal is being zoomed light years through space in a smoky green cloud, coming to land on the planet Oa, which has the Immortals perched atop plinths and some other Green Lanterns, of various alien heritages and vintages, to provide the obligatory training sequence before our Hal can go on to save Earth from the CGI.

This is the origins story, then, and presumably the filmmakers are trying to be reasonably faithful to the source — perhaps too faithful. I mean, who does magic green lanterns and pulsating rings from outer space nowadays? On this evidence, they should have saved the origins for a sequel-prequel.

Ryan Reynolds makes a fairly decent Hal, insofar as he’s given much to do apart from the whirling about and so forth. There are moments when he sparks to life, as in a scene where he boyishly demonstrates his new suit to his best friend the computer geek, but most of the rest is pretty routine.

There’s barely a scene you feel like you haven’t seen before.

Souped up
This is a pity because Reynolds certainly looks the part, pulsating ring and all. If anyone is to be clothed (or unclothed) in a skin-tight green bodysuit, it should be the man recently voted sexiest on the planet by People magazine.

Reynolds presents his credentials for that title in the scene in which Hal gets physically souped up by the aliens of Oa in what looks a bit like a sunbed. Reynolds also has an appealing squint that adds some characterful vulnerability to any part he plays.

Apart from that, one has to presume that Reynolds will be better when he plays the more ambiguous Deadpool in the forthcoming X-Men spin-off — it will certainly be an opportunity to play it harder and tougher than he can here, in what feels like a bit of a kids’ movie, or no more than a kids’ movie.

Oddly enough, Green Lantern made me think of those old TV ads with a caring mom telling her kids — and the viewer — that margarine is so very good for them. Green Lantern is what you might call a margarine movie.