This is the third parody trailer we’ve seen for the upcoming film, slated for release around Thanksgiving. The first mocked traditional romantic comedies, and the second took on buddy comedy The Hangover II..
green lantern
Release Date: 17 June 2011
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Temuera Morrison, Tim Robbins
Genre: Action | Sci-Fi
Director: Martin Campbell
Writer: Greg Berlanti, Michael Goldenberg
MPAA: N/A
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Plot:
A test pilot is granted a mystical green ring that bestows him with otherworldly powers, as well as membership into an intergalactic squadron tasked with keeping peace within the universe.
Movie Review | Green Lantern: Special effects abused as pilot turns superhero thanks to a magical ring
During my heyday of comic-book reading in the late 1950s, I always found Green Lantern a confusing lower-tier hero who never fit into the recognizable world dominated by the forthright Superman and the ever-cool Batman. Yet the character has survived - in one incarnation or another - since the early 1940s.
After years of gestation, the first Green Lantern movie arrives in a crush of sound, mayhem and relentless computer animation. Still, the question remains: Why care about this guy?
Green Lantern is an origin story, cobbled together from plots launched during the DC Comics revival of the character in the 1950s.
Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a reckless hot dog of a test pilot recruited because of his lack of fear to join a band of 3,600 protectors of the universe. He is the first human tapped for the job.
His initial training takes place on a grim, distant planet where he's ridiculed for his human inadequacies. Still, he learns to use his magical green ring, which allows him to conjure up all sorts of computer-generated weapons just in time to battle Parallax, a gigantic demon with a growling face peering through acres of rolling smoke.
The particulars fly at viewers breathlessly, challenging the uninitiated to keep up.
Hal is still haunted by the death of his father, a pilot, years earlier; he struggles to ignite a romance with a fellow pilot (Blake Lively); and he dodges the mounting threat of a scientist (Peter Sarsgaard) infected through contact with Parallax.
Out of all this, director Martin Campbell ( Casino Royale) and a team of writers might have crafted a wondrous adventure flavored with humor and romance.
Instead, Green Lantern follows the lead of most other summer action flicks by unleashing loud, crushing action in its opening scenes before taking brief breaks from the chaos to establish a few character wrinkles, hoping that viewers will be hooked.
Yet it all looks so familiar.
Bodies fly through walls, buildings topple, and fireballs erupt - with little of it looking remotely real or believable - while hyper-excited music wails behind it.
The first time Hal's ring carries him across the universe to the planet Oa, we should feel awe and excitement. Instead, the sequence rushes past us like the narrative link that it is.
By the time Hal squares off against Parallax, so many blasts of energy and mountains of rubble have been generated that the movie has nowhere left to climb.
It just sort of gives up.
The ultra-buff Reynolds (if his torso isn't computer-generated) brings gives a cheeky spirit to the hero, and Sarsgaard luxuriates in the chance to play a tortured madman.
The rest of the actors, though, are left to just hit their marks and stay out of the animators' way.
With its familiar trappings, rhythms, excesses and pandering to the video-game base, Green Lantern plays like a lot of summer-movie predecessors stuck in a continual rut of outsize destruction and sadistic noise.
Talk about thinking inside the box.
Green Lantern. Directed by Martin Campbell. Written by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg. Photographed by Dion Beebe.
1 1/2 stars (out of four)
It's so queasy being green.
MPAA rating:PG-13 (for intense sequences of science-fiction violence and action)
Running time: 1:45
Now showing at the Arena Grand, Crosswoods, Dublin Village 18, Easton 30, Gateway, Georgesville Square 16, Lennox 24, Movies 16 Gahanna, Movies 10 at Westpointe, Movie Tavern Mill Run, Pickerington, Polaris 18, River Valley, Star and Westerville theaters; and the South drive-in
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