In a year with two green superheros, who thought that Seth Rogan and the Green Hornet would receive better reviews that the Green Lantern with Ryan Reynolds?  It is all how you frame the argument.  The big story about the Green Hornet was how Seth Rogan had lost weight for the role.  Even if it is a big piece of sh*t, the stories about that film had a positive/optimistic tone.  Meanwhile, the only pre-production headline I remember about the Green Lantern was that Ryan Reynolds beat out Justin Timberlake, among some other metrosexual B list talent for the lead role.  Ominous…

I had been so optimistic when I saw The Dark Knight, that Christopher Nolan had raised the bar so high on comic book movies that writers and studios would at least raise their game because of raised expectations.  Instead, the studios seem to have said, “Well, sh*t!!! We can’t beat that one so let’s just aim for somewhere between Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Daredevil.”

And from those murky waters emerges the Green Lantern, a barely entertaining movie that makes the digitally overdosed Thor, released earlier this season, look like it was filmed before the invention of the computer.   The plot involves aliens and other planets (which, like Thor, I think automatically renders your comic book second or third tier and not really worthy of a movie adaptation).  It is as if someone asked, “What if we made a 2009-2011 Nicholas Cage movie, but got Dane Cook, or the closest thing Hollywood has to Dane Cook, to star in the lead role.”  It is that mediocre.  And I will never understand why Reynolds, who is buff in this movie, was actually at his most buff when he played a married father in the re-make of The Amityville Horror.  You’d think a superhero in 2011 would be more swollen than a Dad in the 1970s.

The movie basically is a cosmic battle between the good force of will (green guys) versus the bad force of fear (yellow and black stuff – sort of like the intergalactic Pittsburgh Steelers I suppose), which apparently turns Peter Sarsgaard’s character into Eric Stoltz from Mask when exposed to it. Blake Lively plays a fighter pilot with the believability that Denise Richards once played a nuclear scientist in a James Bond film.  Green Lantern must overcome fear issues that stem from his father’s death and his inability to commit to a chick that has managed to turn Leonardo DiCaprio back to monogamy.  You know, problems that affect us all.  There is the plot.  I am sure you can guess how it turns out.

My favorite moment of the Green Lantern experience was, obviously its conclusion when, upon leaving the theater, a member of the theater staff said “Thank you for coming to AMC have a nice day!”  A man standing behind me said to the staff member, “How you gonna waste my time with that sh*t!”  Now he is a moron twice because a) she did not make the movie and b) how could you not know that it would suck?  But as the old saying goes, “Even a rude, unemployed guy with good expectations for a Ryan Reynolds movie is right twice a day.”

Grade: C-