Green Lantern wasn't as terrible as I expected, but not good either.

It was just sorta there. I'm a huge Ryan Reynolds fan. What I mean by that, is I literally love everything he's ever done. From his quirky well cast show "2 Guys, A Girl, And a Pizza Place" or his amazing film, Definitely, Maybe, to even his absolutely awful Just Friends. RR has always made a film much better by being in it. Similar to Nic Cage, another of my favorite actors.

The problem here though, is that RR doesn't help this movie. Green Lantern, while being CGI heavy, and not to bad on the eyes, just wastes the charm and personality of RR. Yea he has his moments,  but the writing and plotting is so atrocious that even RR can't make this worth watching again.

The film starts out with some creature killing a bunch of Lanterns, then changes to another Lantern just chilling in his oddly shaped ship, then getting attacked by the same creature only to escape injured and crash land on Earth. Then it shifts to RR waking up next to some random floozy, darting off to his pilot test and having silly banter with his bosses daughter, who is also his lifelong friend and longtime crush. He ends up screwing things up, almost dying, botching the pilot test thing and being blamed for shutting down a company. He leaves, gets trapped inside a green ball and transported to the alien who gives him the ring, dies, and leaves him to fend for himself.

That's seriously the origin story. In an age of Batman Begins, X-Men: First Class, and Iron Man, we get literally 3 scenes that have little to do with any mythos in the Green Lantern story, then bam, he's a Lantern. That's huge to me. If they don't even care to attempt at creating a story, why should I care about this movie?

So from there, he figures out how to use the Ring and its powers, then it transports him again, to the Lantern HQ which is some giant planet ruled by immortal creators who I guess are responsible for all life. A collection of Gods I suppose. So there RR whines a bit, shows he has zero imagination by thinking of beams and miniguns to train with his ring. Overall, the entire series of scenes to start off the first 30 minutes or so are just flat out silly.

Then we thankfully cut to Peter Sarsgaard who imo steals this movie, despite its heavy setbacks and poor script. He plays another of RR's friends from childhood who also has a crush on the same girl, but instead of taking the route of Pilot like those two, is a science teacher at some either HS or Community College. He gets contacted to perform an autopsy on the crashed Alien and ends up getting infected, making him telepathic and gives him telekinesis. For me, Super Hero movies are more about the villains than the hero itself, since a hero is only as good as his or her opposite. In this case, Sarsgaard is relevant in the story, but just sorta fizzles out at the end.

I won't go any further as to not spoil a very predictable movie, but this really feels like it should easily be another 45 minutes longer. It seemed they set things up, then just ran out of money and ended it where they could. Not really a shame, but I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more if the plot wasn't so rushed. They spent a good 45-50 minutes developing RR, another good 20-25 developing Sarsgaard, then just sorta cut it off. Granted I personally didn't like what was going on during the film, sometimes a great ending can repair a mediocre movie.

Overall, it's a 5/10. It's worth seeing once, but only once.