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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Green Lantern 3D (Film)

by Erin Free | August 10, 2011 15:52 | Edited August 10, 2011 17:15

Torn in too many narrative and stylistic directions, this fails to wholly satisfy on any level, and ends up a disappointing mess.

When it comes to major comic book movies, the two big dogs of the publishing industry - Marvel and DC - have had decidedly different fortunes lately. Marvel has seen triumph after triumph, with the likes of Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor and X-Men: First Class. DC, meanwhile, has had only Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to get excited about. George Miller's potentially game-changing Justice League fell over in pre-production, and a proposed new TV version of Wonder Woman was nothing short of a derisive embarrassment. On top of that, the superb template set up by director Bryan Singer with the grossly under-appreciated Superman Returns was abandoned, seemingly because a few geeks on the internet felt that it "didn't have enough action." Well, with the highly touted Green Lantern, DC have proven once again that when it comes to putting their beloved superheroes on the big screen, they really have no idea. It's not that the film is bad - far from it actually - but it's just a complete and utter mess.

 

At the hectic, often inexplicable Green Lantern's core is Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds makes a good fist of things, flipping effortlessly from his trademark cocky swagger to a more earnest brand of stoicism), a daring pilot chosen to become the first human member of the Green Lantern Corps, a kind of intergalactic police force, with each member assigned a different corner of the galaxy to patrol, and a special ring that gives them the power to make material anything that their mind can conjure. Almost immediately, the untrained and fearful Hal Jordan must not only contend with a massive, planet-consuming, amorphous villain, but also with Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard chewing up the scenery with Al Pacino-style zeal), a scientist infected by said planet-consuming, amorphous villain, and subsequently turned into a telepathic psycho with a head the size of a watermelon. If that's not enough, Hal is also trying to salvage a half-hanging relationship with fellow pilot, Carol Ferris (a slightly dull, decidedly less-than-lively Blake Lively), who is also lusted after by Hector Hammond.

 

Phew! By the film's halfway point, your head will be spinning nearly as much as Hal Jordan's. Green Lantern tries to be way too many things at once, and in doing so, fails to wholly satisfy on any level at all. The film is torn between being a big, wildly imaginative, Star Wars-style science fiction flick, and a more earthbound superhero adventure; because it won't commit to either, entire scenes are left to tilt and waver in the film's uncertain slipstream. Interesting characters (particularly Mark Strong's ambiguous Green Lantern Corps top dog, Sinestro) are introduced, and then either abandoned, or left to do nothing but grind their way through big, indigestible chunks of expository dialogue. Other characters are given precedence, but are later revealed to be inconsequential or totally irrelevant. Action scenes are revved up to neck-snapping levels, but have no real impact upon the story despite all their fuel-injected sound and fury.

 

Though never a big-time visionary, director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Edge Of Darkness, The Mask Of Zorro) has always been a solid craftsmen, and a filmmaker wholly capable of effectively getting a story from A to B. On this past evidence, the blame for the haphazard, messy construction of Green Lantern can probably be placed in the desperately clawing hands of the major studios that produced it, who were obviously trying to get the biggest return on their investment by blindly attempting to appeal to everybody at once. And when you do that, as the saying goes, you usually end up pleasing no one at all. It's a real pity, because if the film had actually committed to what it wanted to be, instead of bouncing waywardly all over the narrative and stylistic map, Green Lantern could very well have been something special indeed.