I really wanted to like Green Lantern, I really did. But sadly you can’t always get what you want and in this case I didn’t even really get what I need.

Adapted from the long running DC comic, Green Lantern tells the story of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a test pilot who has his life turned upside down when an alien peace keeper named Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison) crash lands on Earth and his ring of power chooses Jordan to replace the alien as this sector’s Green Lantern. Jordan is a reckless and irresponsible hotshot who has the same sorts of daddy issues Maverick had in Top Gun and is not really ready for the responsibility. This is reinforced when the ring transports him to Oa, the Green Lantern home world and he is put into training by Tomar-Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush), Killowog (voiced by Michael Clark Duncan) and Sinestro (Mark Strong). Jordan finds his ass completely kicked and gives up. Meanwhile on Earth, Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) is brought in to dissect Abin Sur’s body, mostly because his dad,  Senator Hammond (Tim Robbins), is throwing his loser son a bone, and is accidentally infected with some of the essence of  Parallax (voiced by Clancy Brown) a former Green Lantern corrupted by the yellow power of fear and is the thing that killed Abin Sur whilst wiping out whole planets. Sinestro leads group of Lanterns against Parallax while Jordan tries to come to terms with embracing the power of will that allows the Green Lanterns to make energy constructs and fly.

The story is pretty complicated and it seems a lot more confusing in the retelling but one thing you can say about the movie is that it does a good job of filling the viewer in on what is going on. Sadly, it often does this by way of ponderous exposition at awkward times. If this were the biggest problem with the movie then everything would be peachy. Unfortunately it is not.

In it’s 70 some odd year history, Green Lantern has a lot of material to work with. Several different characters have taken up the ring over the years all with different personalities and strengths. Given this, if they want the Green Lantern to be a wisecracking goof ball, they could have gone with a character other than Jordan. Instead they repurposed Jordan for the actor they had so they could play to Ryan Reynolds’s strengths. That works to a point given that Reynolds is generally funny and charming but he really doesn’t fit the character who is much more serious than the movie makes him out to be. When I reviewed X-Men First Class I forgave it the massively missed details and praised it for it managing to nail the tone…Green Lantern is the opposite. It gets a lot of details right but completely bungles the tone. As a result, it is very hard to take seriously and feels pretty goofy most of the time.

Thinking about Green Lantern as a property, I wonder how viable it really is for serious live action. His primary power is the ability to make constructs out of the green energy. Anything he can think of he can create with the energy and he uses that in combat. Sadly. a lot of times the constructs he uses to fight with are pretty ridiculous. You can get away with punching guys with a big green fist in comics but in live action it looks pretty goofy. One sequence includes stopping an out of control helicopter by surrounding it with a green energy race car and driving it around a track made of the same energy. I am not sure how that sounds as described but it looks pretty fucking stupid. I don’t think it would have looked any worse if he would have made a big green baseball glove to catch it. Honestly, very few of the constructs he makes in the movie come off as cool and just generally look silly.

That isn’t to say that the effects look bad because even with the post-converted 3D  they are pretty solid. The problem is that even looking solid doesn’t help when whole sections of the movie are nothing but effects. In the scenes on Oa, the only thing that isn’t CG is Jordan’s head. Everything else, suit included, is GC. This really breaks my sense of reality and even things that would pop and look pretty feel muddled and overdone. Of course, it is hard to complain too loudly about this as it looks pretty much like it does in the comics but that goes back to my fear that this is a property best left to the printed page and cartoons. Honestly, with as much CG as there is here it is a lot like watching a cartoon most of the time anyway. Your mileage may vary on this as it really comes down to each viewer’s tolerance for this kind of thing.

The writing and pacing is a real mixed bag as well. There are moments where the story clips along at a good pace and the dialogue is clever and pops and there are other moments where the film drags and the writing is horrible. On at least one occasion I sighed audibly at how terrible the lines were. Add to that the poorly executed expository sequences and you have something feels like a bit of a mess. I will say that I am pretty amazed they crammed the amount of material into an hour and forty-five minutes that they did but sadly the quality of that material varies pretty wildly. I also have to admire the moments of lampshade hanging done to address how even with the mask Green Lantern is very clearly Hal Jordan and how ridiculous some of his constructs are.

Performances are all pretty good. I am kind of amazed with what Mark Strong can accomplish while being pointy eared and pink. The dude is just terrific across the board and I don’t think he gets enough recognition. Michael Clark Duncan does a fine voice for Kilowog but I think maybe it is time to start handing those deep voice rolls out to a wider variety of actors. Ryan Reynolds does his thing and in the context of this movie is fine but again I don’t really think he fit the character particularly well. Blake Lively does well enough as love interest Carol Ferris but the character as written is very uneven. Peter Sarsgaard’s head eventually swells to inhuman proportions and I imagine it is because it is filling with all the scenery he is chewing. I mean it has to go somewhere and usually it comes out the other end so that is something.

It isn’t all bad. There are some cool moments of action that are neat to watch and some of the humor, misplaced as it is, hits home. It is not a terrible movie really and if you are an uber fan of Green Lantern then there is probably a lot to like. It seems like a polarizing movie. In the screening I saw there were some people who clapped at the end and seemed to really enjoy it. I was not one of them but to a certain taste this is going to please.

Conclusion [6.5 out of 10]

The score probably looks high given the content of the review but it does enough right to keep you from really hating it, it just does enough wrong to keep it from being particularly satisfying. The effects are good if over used, the humor is amusing if misplaced, the action is exciting if far too rare and the acting is good if kind of wasted. So there are a lot of elements that work but they don’t work well together. To certain tastes this may rock but to mine, it was a big goofy let down.