One of the latest crop of superhero flicks, the Green Lantern hit UK screens this last weekend and I managed to squeeze a visit to the cinema into a busy weekend over in Bristol.
This story from director Martin Campbell is another ‘origins’ tale, this time from the DC Comics universe, squeezed in between the three Marvel movies of 2011, and features Ryan Reynolds as the first human Green Lantern (think inter-galactic police force), Hal Jordan. It certainly doesn’t lack anything in the way of special effects and, in many respects, is a very colourful addition to the superhero movie genre – it’s certainly not the drab and dark world of Batman or that of Superman, characterised by the hero’s surpressed passions and impossible dilemmas.
Therein lies the problem however – it lacks the weight and depth of either of those two titles. The script has clearly been written with a teen audience in mind, and in many ways reminds me of the Transformers series – the incredibly complex Hal Jordan of the comic books is replaced here by a rather cheesy macho man. The massive chunks of exposition that are used throughout are also a bit of a hindrance – the Director clearly decided that the audience wouldn’t be able to enjoy the film unless they knew every little detail of the back-story. I can only hope that the ending indicates that there might be something more substantial for the Green Lantern series further down the line… my advice is to save your pennies for Captain America later this month.