The Green Lantern - Movie Review

Green Lantern gets my free summer pass.

Every summer it seems like one big-budget, effects oriented film gets a free pass by me. This summer it looks like it will be Green Lantern. There’s one film in the summertime that I look for to do nothing other than entertain me while I’m in the theater. I actually did my very first post to this blog with one of these types of films. Yes, I said Brendan Frasier’s film, Journey to the Center of the Earth, was good.

In the summer it can be difficult to get everyone on board to watch one film. It’s been our summer tradition to spend four or five days in Carmel, California. We enjoy the ocean and beautiful trees and scenic drives, but we always take in one summer blockbuster. My brother-in-law always accompanies us on the annual trip so his input is also a factor in the film we’ll see. It would’ve been a slam dunk if Harry Potter was already out, but we all have to sit tight a bit longer for that one.

The Green Lantern is in 3D, is based on a classic comic book character and stars hottie Ryan Reynolds. This seemed to offer something for all of us.

My brother-in-law has a working knowledge on most comic book characters so he gave me a brief background. It was nice to have a little bit of working knowledge going in. The film did a good job sticking to the original origin, as far as I can tell. The Green Lantern is Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a pilot who finds a dying alien who gives him a ring that he’s told was chosen to go only to him. Hal quickly finds that this ring also comes with a lot of responsibility and that’s something Hal has never been good at. To Reynolds credit, he really sells the audience on Hal’s character. He’s good looking enough that a certain amount of cockiness is believable, but Reynolds self deprecating sense of humor keeps it all grounded. I can’t say the same for Blake Lively. I quite liked her in The Town, but every single scene she was in her lips were slightly parted and she had the essence of a pout. If I noticed this, I would have to say it was too many times!

The biggest complaint I’m hearing about this film is that it drags in the middle. I understand that, however, I felt they used the time to build the characters a bit more than usual and I appreciated that.

Special effects wise, the monster of fear was pretty cool and the 3D was a better quality than I experienced last summer.

All I really wanted from Green Lantern was to be entertained and I this it delivered. I was also fortunate enough to mix up my Marvel with my DC, so I stayed through the end credits because I knew the Avengers linked film all have tiny preview clips at the end. Even though I screwed up, I was rewarded with an “extra” scene when most of the theater already left. So if you go, stay till the very end!

I also had a funny situation because I did not know who Mark Strong who played Sinestro was. I was on vacation when I saw this so I did not look him up on IMBD until I got back home. He was so unrecognizable in his Green Lantern makeup I did not realize he was Frank D’Amico from Kick Ass. Oddly enough, I watched Kick Ass on DVD that same night! I had a Mark Strong double feature and didn’t even realize it!