Green Lantern Review

The decision that sank it was made before a frame was shot: render the suit rather than build it, so that Ryan Reynolds spends the film in a glowing green skin that never occupies the same physical space as anything he touches. Everything follows from that unreality. Oa should be overwhelming and instead looks like a screensaver, the constructs Hal Jordan imagines are a racetrack and a fist, and Parallax, one of the more frightening ideas in the source material, is a brown smoke cloud with a face.

Reynolds is likeable and clearly capable of the smart aleck version of this character, which he would later prove elsewhere, but the script keeps interrupting his charm to deliver a speech about fear and will. Peter Sarsgaard is having a strange and much better time as Hector Hammond, whose swelling skull is the only genuinely unsettling image here. Blake Lively is asked to be a fighter pilot and an executive and a girlfriend and given time to be none. Warner buried the franchise on impact.