Critics hate Green Lantern
Green Lantern has met his deadliest foe yet.
With a rumoured $300m budget – and, considering the amount of marketing going into this big green behemoth, that’s believable – the new Green Lantern movie is a big gamble for Warner Bros. And while it’s still too early to call it a bomb – it was the top-grosser on its opening weekend, bringing in $52.7 million – the movie will have to overcome a lot of negative word-of-mouth and some of the most vicious critical brickbats this side of those for another big green fiasco, 1998’s Godzilla remake.
Based on an old DC Comics superhero, Green Lantern stars Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. After Thor and X-Men: First Class, it’s the third big superhero movie of the summer blockbuster season. And it is by far getting the least favourable reviews of the three.
Green Lantern. Art by Gil Kane
So what are critics saying about this multi-million-dollar boondoggle, which has received a 26% approval rating (which is still 8% better than the Jennifer Aniston/Adam Sandler “romantic comedy” Just Go With It) on Rotten Tomatoes? (For the record, the 1998 Godzilla is at 25%.)
So far one of the best (and funniest) is over at The Superficial, where the writer asks, “How the hell do you spend $300 million and wind up with scenes where it looks like Ryan Reynolds disembodied head is floating in front of a cartoon, and the ultimate galactic force of evil is a turd cloud with yellow fog? At some point during test footage, no one realized, ‘Shit, we made a live-action version of The Poop That Took a Pee?’ Because I find that hard to believe.”
The Superficial Green Lantern review
And this, from Twitter:
@Dey_ThePrince green lantern was ass.. im glad i saw that shit for free
@DrFlux It was a lot cooler to wear a Green Lantern T-Shirt a week ago.
Meanwhile, over at the MankaBros.com blog, someone named Kimmo Mustonenen had this to say (we’re not sure, he might be Finnish):
“Warner Brothers would like that we enjoy all the big tent pole things with our wallets – Green Lantern for sure.
“Sadly, but this is more like which one expects from a independent superhero film (of which is nothing, right?). Non-geeks will not enjoy the production because of non-exciting production. It’s passable, but not much more than an two-hour digression.
“Green Lantern is generic – it has an imitative approach that arranges this motion picture film to fall into whichever hell circle Dante envisioned for.”
Harsh words, our (possibly) Finnish friend!
And lest you think the negativity is confined to mainstream or non-comics sources, this is what a couple of editors, Ade and RJ, at the Comicgasm website had to say:
Ade: I can’t believe that hoping for an entertaining movie was asking too much.
RJ: I wasn’t asking for something that’ll blow my mind, just a movie that doesn’t TOTALLY SUCK DONKEY BALLS.
And later, in the same review:
Ade: Not even Blake Lively’s fantastic boobs could save this fucking trainwreck of a film.
Stay tuned for more of the Best of the Green Lantern movie reviews.
